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Theses
2008
Socialisation of the Islamic Terrorist: The Case of Indonesia
Joshua Snider
University of Notre Dame Australia
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Snider, J. (2008). Socialisation of the Islamic Terrorist: The Case of Indonesia (Master of Arts (MA)). University of Notre Dame
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Socialisation of the Islamic Terrorist: The Case of Indonesia
Presented for the degree of
Master of Arts, University Notre Dame Australia
2008
By
Joshua R. Snider
DECLARATION
I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work
which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary educational institution.
Joshua R. Snider
ii
Acknowledgements:
This MA thesis would not have been possible without the support and assistance of a
number of friends and institutions. First I would like to thank the University of Notre Dame
Australia for the postgraduatescholarship that they granted me. If it were not for this
source of funding I would not have been able to complete this project. I would also like
to thank my advisors Dr. Robert Imre and Dr. Carl Ungerer for their mentorship, friendship
and guidance in the research process. In particular I would like to thank Dr. Ian Wilson
of the Asia Research Center at Murdoch University, his knowledge, enthusiasm and
passion for all things Indonesia was a constant source of inspiration. Our many chats
informed my research and helped close the many gaps in my knowledge on the politics
of the region. On a personal level I would to thank Anders Hofstee, Andrew Hamilton,
Tom Gannon, Annaliese Eames and Michelle Gay for their kindness and support over
the past three years.
I dedicate this thesis to my mother.
iii
Abstract:
As the world's largest Muslim country, the resurgence of Islamist religiosity in
Indonesia over the past 10 years has been a source of great concern for security and
terrorism analysts. In an effort to shift away from the sort of discourse the explains violent
Islamist religiosity in Indonesia as an offshoot of Middle East politics and the policy
demands of the Global War on Terror, my specific field of interest in this thesis surrounds
processes of political socialization and what exactly drives the transformation process
from those nominally influenced by various kinds of revisionist conservative theology to
those that become willing to commit acts of violenc e Indonesia. Thus I will draw from
the current situation in Indonesia to argue that the vast and complex trajectories
involved in the radicalization processes of Islamist terrorists demands a level of
discourse that transcends simple theoretical typologies. All too often analysis in this
field of inquiry ascribes 'the drivers' of the radicalization process to rest in either societal
grievances or a version of flawed theology.
Certainly, in the wake of attacks on western targets in Bali as well as the Jakarta
Mariott and Australian Embassy bombings there was some justification for the
assessment that Indonesia had the potential to become another violent flashpoint in the
global war on terror. In addition to the attacks themselves, many cited the growing
traction of various Islamist groups in the post New Order strategic environment as prima
facie evidence that Indonesia was Islamizing (and thus radicalizing) at an alarming
rate. But five years on there is a clear need to reassess both the traction of neofundamentalist Islamism and patterns of radicalization in Indonesia. While the
Indonesian authorities deserve praise for the professional manner in which they have
taken down Jemmah Islamiyah cells, the reason that flashpoint Indonesia hasn't evolved
as some terrorism analysts predicted is because they fundamentally misunderstood the
threat from the outset. Thus I will demonstrate that while the political socialization of
the Islamic terrorist in Indonesia is tied to some extra-regional phenomena, the most
potent dynamics driving violent transformation in the socialization process are in fact
intimately tied to a well-established pattern of structural violence 'hardwired'
into the political discourse of the nation-state.
iv
Contents:
Acknowledgements:.................................................................................................................iii
Abstract:....................................................................................................................................iv
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1
Part 1: Research Methodology ...............................................................................................7
Part 2: Literature Review......................................................................................................10
Chapter 2: Manifesting the Ummah - Rethinking Islamism ...................................23
Part 1: Streams Of Sunni Theological Revivalism ............................................................24
Wahhabism – the ‘first wave’ ...............................................................................................26
Modernism – the “second wave”..........................................................................................29
Neo-revivalists – the third wave ...........................................................................................33
Neofundamentalism – the “fourth wave” ...........................................................................42
Identity and Labels.................................................................................................................56
Conclusion................................................................................................................................59
Chapter 3: Islamism and making of modern Indonesia ..........................................62
Part 1: Colonialism, Revivalism and the Arab World......................................................64
Part 2: Islam and founding of the nation-state ..................................................................74
Part 3: Islamism in The New Order ....................................................................................80
Conclusion................................................................................................................................87
Chapter 4: Politics of the "Preman State" – Islamism in Post Suharto Indonesia .89
Part 1: Political Islam and re-ordering of Power in Post New Order Indonesia..........91
Part 2: Shifting Terrain .........................................................................................................97
Part 3: Modes of Activism – Actors & Ideologies..............................................................98
Conclusion..............................................................................................................................104
Chapter 5: Radicalization - Theory and Process ...................................................106
Part 1: Theoretical Typologies of Radicalisation ............................................................108
Part 2: Radicalisation re-considered .................................................................................114
Part 3: Comparative Group & Individual Case Studies ................................................119
Conclusion..............................................................................................................................128
Conclusion ............................................................................................................130
Bibliography:.........................................................................................................138
v
Introduction
From radical preachers in London and Paris, to bloody insurgencies in Iraq
and Afghanistan, to sporadic acts of Jihadist violence in Indonesia, the past
decade has seen the contentious issue of hard line Islam and the radicalisation of
young men enter the lexicon of public discourse with unprecedented interest.
Whilst we see the end result, assessing the processes by which certain groups
of people become willing and inspired to commit acts of violence presents many
methodological problems and seems particularly vulnerable to politicisation by
those looking to advance the idea of a civilizational confrontation bet ween
the west and Islamic worlds. In this thesis, I will dra w from the current situation in
Indonesia to argue that the vast and complex trajectories involved in the
radicalisation processes of Islamist terrorist demands a level of discourse that
transcends simple theoretical typologies. All too often, analysis in this field of
inquiry ascribes ‘the drivers’ of the radicalization process to rest in either societal
grievances or fla wed theology.
Certainly, in the wake of attacks on western targets in Bali as well as the
Jakarta Mariott and Australian Embassy bombings there was some justification for
the assessmentthat Indonesia had the potential to become another violent
flashpoint in the global war on terror. In addition to the attacks themselves, many
cited the gro wing traction of various Islamist groups as prima facie evidence that
Indonesia was Islamising (and thus radicalising) at an alarming rate. However,
five years on there is a clear need to reassess both the traction of neofundamentalist Islamism and patterns of radicalisation in Indonesia. Whilst the
Indonesian authorities deserve praise for the professional manner in which they
have taken down Jemmah Islamiyah (JI) cells, the reason that flashpoint Indonesia
hasn’t evolved as some terrorism analysts predicted is because they
fundamentally misunderstood the threat from the outset. They got it wrong in
1
several key areas. First, by engaging in an oversimplified understanding of the
Islamist label as one that represents a monolithic set of means and ends, they
fundamentally misjudged the culpability of Islamic religiosity in the radicalisation
process. Second, there was a tendency to gloss over a series of complex local
dynamics in favour of placing these local events into a global calculus. Beyond
these core miscalculations the ground is shifting once again in the debate over
processes of radicalisation, which requires a recalibration of scholarly attention.
In Indonesia and else where rather than seeing the manifestation of Islamism as a
confrontational ideology to western hegemony the neo-fundamentalists, struggling
to justify their o wn position, are shifting back to an agenda of domestic
Islamisation. In case of JI, a report published by the International Crisis Group
(ICG) indicates that the group has shifting from favouring western targets to a
more localized policy agenda – including the targeting of judges who refuse to
enforce Sharia law.
To unpack the theme of radicalisation in the context of the complex
Indonesian environment this thesis will engage several different modes of
analysis. Generally, in this thesis I will approach the theme of radicalization from
the point of vie w of the complex relationship betw een the forces of Islam and the
institutions of the nation-state. I take it as axiomatic that beyond specific types of
theological interpretation, the role of the nation-state is of crucial importance in
understanding at a macro level the process by w hich seeds of violent religiosity
are se wn. To this end, the upcoming chapters will engage in an in-depth
discussion on the role of the Islamism within the framework of the nation-state,
first on a global level looking at the evolution of the Islamist expression as it
impacted the discourses of nation-states in the Arab world and South Asia and
then as it impacted the development of the Indonesian nation-state. This thesis will
challenge the very common view that Islamist violence occurred in Indonesia in
early 2000s solely within the framework of the post September 11 environment.
2
Through my discussion on linking Islamism to the project of Indonesian nationalism
I will demonstrate the consistent presence of forces that maintain a project to
Islamise the state. Moreover, I will highlight the co-optation and subjugation of
Islamist forces at the hand of secular nationalist leaders who have seen using
Islamist as an effective means by which to keep other ideological forces in check.
From there, my discussion will shift to specific theoretical typologies of
radicalisation and I will engage a case study of tw o leading Salafi-Jihadist groups.
Following a comprehensive methodology and literature revie w the second
chapter of my thesis will specifically address the development of Islamism from
both a theoretical and historical perspective. Given that the dominant field of
literature on Islamic terrorism generally and processes of radicalization more
specially, operate on the assumption that Islamism is a uniquely transformative
terrorist ideology that inspires acts of violence, a comprehensive and nuanced
discussion of the evolution of this phenomenon is necessary before I can begin to
explore these dynamics in the Indonesian context. Thus, the second chapter will
engage a broad discussion of the various manifestations of the Islamist
revivalism and will analyse the phenomenon through four different styles of
activism and will discuss at length the complex ideological and theological rifts
within these waves of activism, ranging from the austere Salafism of the Arabian
Peninsula to the style of Brotherhood thattook root in Egypt in the early 20th
century. In highlighting these distinct waves, this chapter will also discuss the role
of the Islamist agenda within the nation-state in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries
and demonstrate that whilst specific theology played a part in the evolution of
Islamism, the evolvement of Islamism as a violent vanguard movement, withdra wn
from society occurred as the result of secular political processes.
Having established the ideological cleavages within the Islamist space
globally, the third chapter will address the theme of Islamism from the point of
vie w of the development of modern Indonesia. The first area of consideration in
3
this chapter will be the modes of transmission of Islamism from the Middle East
into the region and the impact this had on stirring anti-colonial sentiment. In addition
to discussing the connection with the Middle East, this chapter will also explore
the complex delineations within the archipelago’s Muslim space and highlight the
multitude of complex debates over interpretations and the precise role of Islam in
the affairs of the state. Following this, the third chapter will evaluate some of the
major dynamics leading up to Indonesian independence and will assess the
important role Islam played in that process. Specifically, I will address the
Japanese radicalisation of the region’s Islamist voice and their attempt to spurn
anti-colonial sentiment by using forces and institutions of Islam. In addressing the
role of Islam in the immediate post World War Two era, the analysis in the third
chapter will delineate the complex role of Islam in the debate over the parameters
of Indonesian nationalism and will further highlight the extent to which these
questions have gone unresolved. The third chapter will more specifically evaluate
the role and dynamics of the Islamist movement within both the Sukarno and
Suharto regimes and ho w both regimes attempted, through a variety of means, to
both harness and subjugate the po wer of Islam for their o wn ends and in so
doing, set the tone for manifestations of violent religiosity later on.
The fourth chapter specifically addresses the complex role of Islam in the
post Suharto period and raises a number of issues related to the integration of
various Islamists movements into the broader pattern of structural violence that
emerged throughout the New Order period. This chapter will evaluate the extent
to which the conclusion that Islamist ideology in of itself is uniquely violent and
transformative is problematic. The analysis raised in the fourth chapter will
demonstrate the extent to which the forces of Islam have been co-opted and
used by people with distinctly secular agendas to achieve and maintain certain
po wer structures.
The fifth chapter will engage the theme of radicalisation in both a
4
theoretical and practical way. I will discuss at length t wo leading theories on
radicalisation and will evaluate the applicability of these theories in the Indonesian
context. Following this, I will discuss a ne w way of looking at the theme of
radicalisation that engages a more regionally appropriate and nuanced vie w taking
into account the basis of analysis established in the t wo preceding chapters. The
theoretical typology I will propose, the five drivers approach, will argue that
processes of violent transformation in the radicalisation process need to be
analysed through a set of five independent socialising drivers, being social
net work, leadership, ideology, time pressure and criminality. The final area of
consideration will be the presentation of a case study looking at two leading Salafi
Jihadist organizations, Laskar Jihad and JI, two of the most effective and
prodigious organizations that have adopted a violent discourse.
The theme of radicalisation and processes of violent transformation within
that process are complex and above all else the analysis I will present in the
upcoming chapters seeks to problematise the assumption that it is possible to
ascribe processes of violent transformisation on to either versions of fla wed
theology or societal grievance.
5
Chapter 1: Methodology and Literature Review
The current state of scholarship on the radicalisation process of Islamists
in Indonesia is fundamentally underdeveloped. Preferring to look at issues like
net work structure, global connectivity and funding streams, experts in the field
have been slo w to engage in a comprehensive examination of the radicalisation
process itself. So, at its core the task of thisresearch project is to contribute
(albeit in a very limited capacity) to the field of scholarship by investigating the
causal relationship bet ween the dissemination of ultra orthodox theological
revisionism and the increased number of Jihadi incidents across the Indonesian
archipelago. In doing so, it is my intention to contribute to the development of a
theoretical typology that assists in explaining the transformation of conservative
Islamists into violent Jihadis.
From an empirical and methodological standpoint, current scholarship from
w estern analysts on the theme of radicalism and the radicalisation process in
Indonesia is underdeveloped. The most widely circulated research in the field has
been focused very narro wly on understanding Jihadi cell structure and global
connectivity associated with these cell networks. As a result, in the Southeast
Asian region there exists a fairly well-traversed field of scholarship that has
addressed virtually every aspect of Jemmah Islamiyah (JI). It is known, with some
certainty ho w JI functions, its aims and motivations, ho w it recruits members and
approximately ho w many members it counts throughout the archipelago. Thus,
w hile a detailed understanding of one particular group has been gained, this
understanding has been gleaned without looking at a far more complex set of
issues in the radicalization process itself. The traditional security studies analysis
isn’t without merit, but its utility has clear limits. There has been an unfortunate
conformity of opinion around the principle that w e can smash cells without also
engaging in a detailed analysis of the social contexts that transform religious
conservatives in violent killers. The lack of nuance among many western
6
scholars may be due in some part to the fact that the dominant field of analysts in
the field have come from emerging “terrorism studies” industry and lack a
comprehensive social science approach to the subject. One could also postulate
that the deficiencies in current research reflect nature and timeliness of the
subject matter and has been specifically served the needs of policy practitioners
for whom the complexities of the socialisation process of individual Jihadis have
been peripheral to fighting a ‘global war on terror.’ Beyond the lack of scholarly
nuance, we also have ‘levels of analysis’ disagreements among academics and
analysts looking to justify their o wn research agendas to universities and
governments. Despite the strides that have been made in understanding Islamism
and root causes of radicalism, the major issue preventing the development of a
consistent theoretical framework in this field is the continued presence of
academic fiefdoms. Not only do fights bet ween disciplines emerge, but fights
within them. Thus, situations develop where thematic experts and political
scientists are pitted against regional experts, usually anthropologists and
sociologists. Regional specialists often reject outside comparison and hold firmly
to the contention that only they have the depth of kno wledge necessary to weigh
in. Thematic experts, while not entirely dismissive of their regionalists colleagues,
are by the nature of their specialty often reductionist in vie w, searching for a
mechanism to order the realities of Indonesia (and the region) into a global
calculus. Essentially, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, psychologists,
security studies and IR scholars and political economists are all arguing that their
level of analysis is most fitting to assess the theme of violent transformation
in the radicalisation process.
Part 1: Research Methodology
To unpack the complex trajectories involved in the violent transformation of
Jihadists, in this thesis I will engage several different methodological typologies to
explore the themeof radicalisation ranging from political history analysis to
7
theoretical, and a comparative group case study. In a field of inquiry as complex
as radicalisation processes, it would be highly problematic to delve into this field
without first engaging a broad discussion on the complex delineations within the
Islamist rubric and its role in the evolution of Indonesia. To this end, the first
several chapters of this thesis will employ a political history analysis on the
theme of Islamism first, on a global level, and then the role of Islamism in the
development of the Indonesian nation-state and in the post Suharto period. By
presenting a detailed political history of Islamism, both in a global and Indonesian
context, it is my intent to question some of the core assumptions that have come
to dominate analysis in the field. In particular, I will use the levels of analysis
presented in the first part of the thesis to question the assumption that there is a
prima facie causal relationship bet ween modes of religious expression and violent
transformation.
Following the political history analysis presented in the second through to
fourth chapters, the fifth chapter will engage the theme of radicalisation and
propose a ne w framework for looking at this theme in the Indonesian context. To
test the typologies of radicalisation I present a comparative case study on t wo
leading Salafi-Jihaidst organizations in Indonesia. In looking at a theme as complex
as radicalisation, case studies are particularly helpful as they allow for the
exploration of certain dynamics in a way that other analytic frameworks do not.
Thus, from a methodological perspective I use the case study approach to
highlight a series of practical examples that demonstrate the complexity of the
radicalization problem. Moreover, a case study analysis will allow me to test both,
the viability of the approach I propose, and to highlight the weakness of other
major approaches discussed. The case studies will engage a broad set of
comparative criterion such as background, aims/ideology, targets and current
operational status and will not be evaluating the specific circumstances of
individual terrorists.
8
My decision to direct the focus of the case study to wards specific groups,
rather than individuals, is borne from a number of realities including, most
significantly, the lack of indepth analysis and quality of the data on individual
terrorists in Indonesia that would be necessary to construct comprehensive
individual case studies. Thus, while there is no shortage of public statements from
incarcerated Bali bombers, these data sets are not helpful in engaging a sound
social science analysis on the theme of radicalisation because of their excessive
focus on grievance and ideology, which are precisely the levels of analysis I
wish to move a way from. However, because the field of radicalisation is so
under theorised, the data available from open-source channels is not helpful data
on the theme of radicalization and thus poses some inherent problems.
This project contains many structural limitations that are worthy of some
clarification. First, I do not speak Bahasa Indonesia and as such have probably
been unable to access important data. I am aware of this limitation and have
attempted to work as best I can with publicly available research in English.
Furthermore, the economic and time constraints of an MA thesis did not allow for
either; the translations of books and documents in to English, or for an extensive
field work component. As a result, there will be poignant areas that this
thesis does not address. In terms of data gathering I did not have access to
classified material either through being in the direct employ of the government or
through non-official channels. However, if I had had access to this sort of data,
its use is highly problematical. The use of detention and interrogation records
presents many ethical and methodological problems and reliability of any data
gained under such circumstances is questionable, especially given that
much of it is unverifiable and thus beyond scholarly critique. This reality reflects
my choice to focus on a broad case study rather than upon in-depth individual
case studies.
9
Part 2: Literature Review
To date the depth of scholarship devoted to the general theme of radical
Islam in Indonesia and specifically to the sociological radicalisation process of
Jihadis has left much to be desired. Certainly, the rise of Islamism in different parts
of the world coinciding with various acts of terrorism has given rise to significant
amounts of scholarship, and while some aspects of this scholarship is helpful and
innovative, the core issue of determining the tipping-point in the radicalization
process remains fundamentally under-theorised by current scholarship.
Because of the many theoretical approaches that need to be employed to
understand the radicalisation process, relevant scholarship in the field is varied,
complex, and multidisciplinary and dra ws from fields spanning the social
sciences. Thus, the relevant scholarship generally fits into several broad
categories. The first examines Islamist thought at a global macro level and is
represented most significantly by the father of political Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, with
significant and relevant scholarly contributions from the likes of Olivier Roy and
Gilles Kepel. The next important category of analysis examines theoretical
typologies of modern terrorism and political violence on both a global and regional
level and is represented by the likes of Bruce Hoffman, Mark Jergensmeyer,
Rohan Gunaratna, Zachery Abuza and Greg Barton. On the theme of political
Islam and the rise of radical Islamism in the context of the Indonesian nation-state
Greg Fealy, Virginia Hooker, Giora Eliraz, Donald Porter, Robert Hefner, Jacques
Bertrand and John Sidel and have all written important pieces of analysis worthy
of revie w in this thesis. The final category of literature explores the theme of
radicalisation, here analysis provided by David Wright-Neville, Fadhali
Moghaddam, Ehud Springzak and various reports from the ICG all provide cogent
levels of analysis that are worthy of further consideration.
10
Literary Cluster 1: On the origins of political Islam
Before we can examine the main literary works on Islamist discourse and
the radicalisation process in the Indonesian context, it is first necessary to
discuss the relevantliterature on the evolution, gro wth and historical antecedents
of global Sunni Islamism and the means by which this was transitioned into a
“modernist” liberation ideology. Set against the backdrop of the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire and European Colonial occupation of Muslim lands, there emerged
a cabal of thinkers from al-Azra University in Cairo that revolutionised the
interpretation of Islamic theological doctrine from one of classical didactical
jurisprudence to that of a modern socio-political liberation ideology. In this
context, the works and discourse of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammed Abduh
and later Sayyid Qutb are of prima-facie value. By way of a contextual caveat, it
is necessary to stress that by discussing the influence of thinkers like Qutb and
Afghani I am not implying that the neo-revisionist vie ws of these men are wholly
responsible for the rise of Islamist ideology in Indonesia. While it is clear that the
“al-Azra thinkers” have influenced some elements of neofundamentalist movement
(notably JI and Majelis Mujahideen Indonesia (MMI)), it is also clear that Dural Islam,
the biggest Islamist movement in the Archipelago was inspired by the classic
jurisprudence strain of Islamist thought advanced by the likes of academics as will
be discussed in this thesis.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks the world’s gaze has turned to
radical Islam and supposed project to ‘understand’ the terrorist mindset, as such
an ever increasing amount of literature has captured the world’s imagination and a
considerable amount of attention has been given to understanding and dissecting
the work of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and who
w as executed by the regime of 'Abd al-Nasr in 1966. While Qutb is often credited
as the ‘father of radical Islam,’ many of his ideas w ere based on the on
the project of t wo great Egyptian thinkers, Jamal Afghani and Muhammed Abduh.
11
Thus, before we can engage in a substantive discussion on Qutb, it is first
necessary to analyse the project of Afghani. While Afghani’s work has not been
directly published in English, Nikki Keddie’s “Sayyid Jamal Ad-din Al-afghani: A
Political Biography remains the most authoritative analysis of this work and
provides an excellent guide to his life and ideology. In it, Keddie establishes
Afghani’s career as a thinker and activist and discusses the impact of his work
on the Islamic world and ho w this continues to be a source of inspiration and
controversy (Keddie, 2001). Afghani’s project of Islamic modernism, developed in
his lectures, polemics, short essays, and ne wspaper columns was based on the
idea of finding a modus vivendi bet ween traditional Islamic culture and the
philosophical and scientific challenges of the modern West. Essentially, Keddie
argues that Afghani took a middle position between blind Westernisation and its
w holesale rejection by the traditional ‘ulama’, and that his basic assumption was
shared by the whole generation of the 19th century Muslim thinkers and activists,
being that modern Western science and technology are essentially separable
from the ethos and manners of European nations and can and should be acquired
by the Islamic world without necessarily accepting the theological and
philosophical consequences emerging from their application in the Western
context (Keddie 1984, Keddie2001). Afghani’s call for the independence of
individual Muslim nations has been a key factor in the development of the socalled “Islamic nationalism” and as such, Afghani became a major source of
inspiration for such global revivalist movements as the Muslim Brethren of
Egypt, Jama`at-i Islami and Hizbut ut’Tahrir of Pakistan.
In tracing the evolution of literature on the rise of Islamist thought, Sayid
Qutb is, without question, the most talked about thinker to emerge in his
generation. His first work ‘Social Justice in Islam’ was published in 1949 after a
sojourn in the United States. In it, Qutb discusses his perceptions of the
persistence of gross socio-economic inequality in most Muslim societies, the need
12
for vie wing Islam as a totality, imperatively demanding comprehensive
implementation, and the depiction of the West as a neo-crusading force. Qutb’s
last and most influential work ‘Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones)’ published in 1964,
w ould have the deepest impact on shaping Islamist thought. Whether Qutb
intended it as the Islamist version of Lenin’s ‘What is to be done’ is debatable
(Fealy & Bubalo 2006: 16). As an interpretive w ork, Adnan Mussallam’s ‘From
Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the foundations of Radical Islamism’ is
also note worthy. Using the evolution of Sayyid life and writings, Mussallam
argues that Qutb, and thinkers like him, seek philosophical refuge in the
reactionary rejection of the present and fantasies of some Golden Age that
probably never was. Moreover, Mussallem contends that Qutb and other al Azhar
thinkers rely too heavily on ultra conservative Salfi (Deobandi) interpretations of
the Quran to justify their claims which he claims are the "original" ones, but which
many claim contradict the Quran itself – especially the Qutb interpretation on the
significance of collective rather than personal Jihad.
In assessing the trajectory of neo-revisionist Islam, especially in the wake
of September 11 and the ensuing Global War on Terror many analysts and have
sought to link the project of Qutb to Wahhabism – the ultra orthodox Saudi state
ideology as t wo functions of the same ideology – one the extension of the other.
Terrorism analysts and al Qaeda ‘experts’ like Rohan Gunaratna and Zachary
Abuza are purveyors of a typology of analysis that constructs a neat equation
that casts Qutb’s Islamic modernism as responsible for inspiring terrorists, while
Wahhabism is somehow responsible for ‘radicalising’ Muslim subjects around the
w orld. Certainly, the Saudis have used their vast wealth to export Wahhabism. It
also true that Saudis gave refuge to various Islamist preachers from around the
Arab world in the 1960s and 1970s, which one could argue further radicalised
their o wn ulema. More convincingly, fifteen of the nineteen September 11
hijackers were Saudi nationals. Given this evidence, it is understandable ho w
13
analysts have reached the conclusion that the tw o streams must be working in
collusion to advance a broad confrontation with w estern hegemony. Whilst
convenient for policy makers and intelligence services that want actionable’
intelligence, this type of analysis represents a vast over-simplification of the
facts. Here, the noted University of California professor of religious studies Hamid
Algar has produced a substantive and accessible work in ‘Wahhiabism a Critical
Essay.’ In it, Algar deconstructs and challenges many of the theological premises
of the Saudi State ideology and challenges the assumption that pure Wahhabism
is inherently a terrorist ideology (Algar 2002). He argues that while links can be
dra wn bet ween al Azra thinkers and Wahabbism these actors are more friends
of convenience than real ideological travellers (Algar 2002).
On the development of Islamism in the context of the modern nation-states,
The Trail of Political Islam by the noted French political historian Giles Kepel
eloquently traces the history and failure of political Islam as a socio-religious
ideology. Spanning from Morocco to Philippines, Kepel’s work highlights the
evolution of the Islamist agenda as a broad phenomenon and its attempt to act as
a sort of ideological counter- weight to other political experiments (Kepel 2003).
Most importantly, Kepel highlights the failure of Islamism as a movement for mass
social change and argues that the inability of this movement to gain popular
support combined with the policies of specific governments sa w portions of the
movement withdra w from mainstream political participation into violent activism
(Kepel2003). In this context, Kepel argues that the emergence of violent
manifestations of Islamism occurred as a direct result of its failure to gain popular
mass support and justified, in the mind of thinkers like Qutb, that the reason for the
failure of the movement resulted from the weakness of other Islamist leaders and
their willingness to compromise with various secular agendas. As a result, Kepel
agues that a number of people within the far-right of the Islamist space began to
see themselves as an elite moral ‘vanguard’ with a God-given mandate to Islamise
14
society from the top do wn. Interpreted this way the use of violence can be
justified against apostate Muslims and governments that do not abide by their
agenda (Kepel 2003).
Picking up on a similar trend of analysis, Olivier Roy’s influential Globalized
Islam: The Search for the New Ummah is a seminal work and provides great
insight into the development of Islamism in late 20th century. Similar to Kepel, Roy
argues that violent Islamism arose out of the failure of a series of secular political
agendas. However, where Kepel traces the evolvement of Islamism as a
historical movement, Roy addresses the phenomenon from a sociological
perspective and maintains that while Islamism has its roots in the Arab world it
has evolved into de-territorialised ideology without a geographic centre (Roy
2004). As such, he argues that the violence of Islamism as represented by the
discourse of groups like al Qaeda must be understood outside the context of a
unified set of social grievances and/or theological interpretations. Roy further
proposes that the experience of volunteers in places such as Afghanistan sa w
the emergence of what he labels as ‘Neofundamentalism agenda,’ broadly
combining the rejection of political discourse as advocated by the Saudi inspired
Salafi ideology with the violent activism of the post Qubtist Muslim Brotherhood
(Roy 2004).
Literary Cluster 2: On Terrorism and Political Violence
Contributing in a more general way to the field of terrorism research is
Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, a seminal text on the phenomenon of modern
terrorism and political violence. Whist not concerned specifically with al Qaeda or
Southeast Asia, but perhaps more insightful than many a book authored on both
subjects. Hoffman’s analysis on the historical evolution of terrorism and the
terrorist mindset is fla wless, and accurately captures the essence of the
internationalisation of global terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than
15
conducting a global tour the way Abuza and Gunaratna did, he uses a variety of
case studies to explore a range of topics including, the effectiveness of suicide
terrorism, the scourge of theologically driven terrorism, the use of ne w media and
ne w technologies by terrorist organisations, and potential use of Weapons of
Mass Destruction (WMD). Hoffman is the director of the RAND Corporation’s
Washington DC operations and an adjunct professor of security studies at
Georgeto wn University and has clearly pitched his work at the informed policy
practitioner who may not be an expert in the field of terrorism. For this reason, he
captures an effective balance of insight and accessibility.
Equally impressive and significant in the study in religious violence is
Professor Mark Juergensmeyer’s, ‘Terror in the Mind of God.’ He argues that the
violence associated with religion is not an aberration but comes from the
fundamental structure of the belief system of all major religions. In the first half of
the book, he examines case studies from fringe elements all of the world’s largest
religions justifying violence. He was able to obtain access to some of the most
radical religious sects in the world, which significantly increased the potency of
the case studies he employed. In the second half of the book he examines some
of the sociological and philosophical themes that run common to religious violence
around the world. Throughout the book, Juergensmeyer is trying to demonstrate
several key concepts: ho w religious ideas and the sense of religious community
have been endemic to cultures of violence from w hich terrorism has sprung; ho w
the drama of religion has been especially appropriate to the theatre of terror; ho w
images of martyrdom, satanisation and cosmic w ar have been central to religious
ideologies; and ho w these images and ideas have been agents of social
empowerment, personal pride and political legitimisation. He demonstrates all of
these points successfully. Like Hoffman’s work, Terror in the Mind of God is a
seminal text in the field of religious violence, and w hile I do not necessarily agree
with all of his findings the book has made a large contribution to my research.
16
On the theme of Islamist terror generally, and the al Qaeda organization
specifically, Rohan Gutaratna’s ‘Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, is a
populist tour de force, and probably the most authoritative account on the global
connectivity of the al Qaeda organisation on the market. Gutaratna deserves
much credit as an analyst and researcher, he sa w and wrote about the threat
posed by al Qaeda long before anyone in the intelligence or academic community
w as interested. What Gutaranta brilliantly captures is the extent to which al
Qaeda has latched itself on to various local Muslim grievances across the world,
and ho w these local grievances have become part of the global agenda. He takes
the reader on a grand survey and provides a brilliant general picture for the
novice reader on ho w al Qaeda generally functions. He does not spend much time
on Indonesia specifically, so there is not a lot of ne w and relevant data in that
regard. Scholarship is split on the continued relevance of al Qaeda. Many argue
that without freedom of movement in Afghanistan its operational capacity has
been severely limited. Thus, al Qaeda has morphed from that of a multinational
terror corporation into that of a franchise operation. Where, once bin Laden was
the President and CEO of “Terror Inc.”, he is now the figurehead inspiring likeminded groups. Nevertheless, for anyone wanting to understand globalised
radical Islam, Inside al Qaeda is a must read. Like many scholars engaged in the
field I would argue that Gunaratna is too concerned with ‘counting guns and
bombs’ and not concerned enough with exploring the deep political and
sociological complexities involved in the radicalisation process and the
development of the Islamist world vie w.
Zachary Abuza’s ‘Militant Islam in Southeast Asia; Crucible of Terror’ fits
squarely in the first category of scholarship. Currently the most populist and
accessible work specifically devoted to the theme of radicalism in Southeast Asia,
Abuza takes the reader on a country by country tour of Islamic radicalism in
Southeast Asia, discussing the organisations, players, means and motivations at
17
w ork. While Crucible of Terror represented an important innovation in terrorism
related scholarship in Southeast Asia it is hard to get past its many deficiencies.
First, Abuza presents a wealth of fascinating data related to terror financing and
recruiting techniques but his sources are, in too many cases, unverifiable. There
is some speculation in the academic community that he was fed information by
various intelligence agencies, which may not be necessarily bad or inaccurate
just academically unverifiable. Second, there are many minor inaccuracies, which
can be forgiven based on the fact that the book is no w several years old and
ne w information comes to light all the time. However, my fundamental issue with
Crucible of Terror has nothing to do with data, these are minor points, my main
issue has to do with thematic inference. Many agree that radical Jihadism is a
major issue and globally integrated and very sophisticated organisations must be
faced. However, Abuza paints a picture (albeit subtly) that any expression of a
Muslim identity is tantamount to advocating Salafi Jihadism, missing many
complexities and potentially giving the wrong impression. While the reader can not
help but be impressed with this work, one also cannot help but be left with the
impression that this work has been infused with a healthy dose of neoconservative paranoia.
More specifically devoted to the theme of radicalism in the region, Greg
Barton’s Indonesia’s Struggle: Jemaah Islamiyah and the Soul of Islam is a small
but authoritative volume on the threat posed by JI. Written in the wake of the Bali
bombings, Barton traces the religious, cultural and political development of JI and
argues that it has important features in common with al Qaeda. Based on
extensive research in Indonesia, the book assesses the level of support for JI and
examines the Indonesian government’s success in dealing with the threat it
poses. Barton argues that, while the Indonesian authorities reacted well to events
in Bali their subsequent response has been not as effective as commonly
assumed. Whilst it could be argued that some of the content presented is dated, in
18
my vie w Barton presents a concise ‘snapshot’ on the many of the complex
regional realities driving Islamism in Indonesia.
Literary Cluster 3: Islamism and Indonesian Nation-State
On the broad theme of Islam in Southeast Asia, Dr. Greg Fealy and Dr.
Virginia Hooker (both of the ANU) have recently compiled and edited Voices of
Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook. This work presents a
broad range of primary source translations from across the region and explores
in depth such themes as: expressions of faith across the region; the role of
Sharia, Islam, the state and governance; gender; and the family, and devotes
considerable attention to the theme of radicalism and Jihad. Due to the broad
cross-disciplinary nature of the content covered it is hard to critique its content
consistently as the themes addressed vary dramatically. But for those of us who
are in interested in the region but do not speak or read fluent Bahasa and Malay,
Voice of Islam presents an excellent opportunity to read translated primary
sources from the region’s leading Muslim thinkers and political leaders. While much
of its content does not really pertain to my area of interest it certainly helps one
understand Islam’s dynamics in the region. On the theme of Islamism and its
connection to the traditions and ideologies that emerged in the Middle East, Gioraz
Elriaz’s Islam in Indonesia: Modernism, Radicalism and Middle East Dimension
is particularly helpful. Eliraz traces the complex history of the connection bet ween
Islamist movements in the Middle East and Indonesian and the dissemination of
discourses bet ween the t wo regions (Elriaz 2004). His work is useful for the
purpose of my analysis because he problematises many of the conspiratorial
levels of analysis that dominate the field of scholarship. Moreover, Elriaz
challenges the assumption that a mysterious cabal of Islamists from the centre of
the Muslim world dominate the trajectory of Islamism in Indonesia and his analysis
highlights the complex process of indigenisation that takes place bet ween the
ideas that emerge in the Middle East and their dissemination into the archipelago.
19
Thus, he argues that rather than accepting the discourse of Middle Eastern
Islamism on a wholesale basis, ideas from the centre of the Muslim world have
been adopted in Indonesia through a distinctly local framework.
On the theme of Islamism in the unfolding of Indonesian nationalism, Jacuqe
Bertrand’s Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia and Bob Hefner’s Civil
Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia are particularly useful.
Hefner’s work broadly traces the role of the Islam in the democratisation of the
Indonesian nation-state and outlines the role that various Islamist factions have in
the project of Indonesian nationalism (Hefner 2000). Hefner’s work is important
because he highlights the complex variations that exist within the conservative
Islamist space in Indonesia and problematises the hypothesis that there is
uniformity amongst the plurality of actors that maintain an agenda to Islamise the
Indonesian nation-state. Bertrand’s work similarly addresses the theme of
nationalism but rather than using religion as the primary level of analysis, he
broadly discusses the evolution of the nation-state and the complex set of ethnopolitical and religious dynamics that were negotiated in arriving at the parameters
of Indonesian nationalism and then the conflicts that emerged from lack of
consensus on a number of issues. In this context he highlights Islam as
one of the key ideological fault lines in the development of post-colonial Indonesian
nationalism and the extent to which it has been a source of violent challenge to
the state (Bertrand 2004). Bertrand’s analysis is important not only because it
details the role of Islam in ethno-political dynamics of inter-communal relations, but
also because he demonstrates ho w leaders for distinctly secular ends have used
the forces of violent Islamism.
On the role of Islam within the framework of the nation-state Donald
Porter’s Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia and John Sidel’s Riots,
Pogroms and Jihad are both works worthy of some consideration. In
understanding the complex role of Islam within the context of the New Order,
20
Porter’s work is particularly valuable and he succinctly establishes the processes
by which Suharto both co-opted and suppressed the forces of Islamism for his
o wn end (Porter 2005). In addition to highlighting the role of Islam in the New
Order, Porter also provides a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the
“corporatised framework” of the Indonesian nation-state under Suharto and
processes by which various groups were used to effectively manage one
another to ensure the longevity of the regime. Similar to Porter, Sidel’s work
engages an analysis that juxtaposes the unfolding of Indonesian nationalism with
the upsurge religiosity in the late New Order period (Sidel 2006). He proposes that
the prevalence of Islamist violence in the immediate post New Order period
occurred as a result of a semi-organised effort on the part of secular elites to
maintain legacy po wer structures in the context of gro wing social and political
change. As a structural Marxist, Sidel is primarily concerned with modes of
w ealth distribution and maintains that in post New Order Indonesia legacy elites
feared the rise of socialism and used forces of Islamism to keep its influence in
check (Sidel 2006). Based on this, Sidel questions the applicability of much of
w hat the current field of security and terrorism studies has to offer on the subject
of violent religiosity. Rather, he claims that it is problematic to vie w Islamism
in Indonesia as part of a globalising trend and instead argues it needs to be
vie wed in the context of series of local phenomena (Sidel 2006).
Literary Cluster 4: Radicalisation
The field of current literature on the processes of Islamist radicalisation is thin on
the ground both in terms of general theoretical typologies and research that
addresses the specific dynamics in Indonesia. In terms of general typologies on
the radicalisation process, the fifth chapter of this thesis will engage the
contributions of several well known analysts including, the likes of Fadali
Moghadam and Ehud Sprinzak.
21
On the theme of radicalisation in the Indonesian context several works are
w orthy of consideration. Neville-Wright’s 2004 article ‘Dangerous Dynamics’ in
Pacific Review attempts to construct a sort of theoretical typology of Islamist
activism in the Southeast Asian region through a categorisation of various types
of Islamist activism, ranging from activist, radical and terrorist. While his work
makes an important contribution to the field of literatureof processes of
radicalisation, his categorical distinctions pose many problems. While there are
clear delineations in modes of expression adopted by the different types of
Islamist organisations, attempting to understand Indonesian Islamist religiosity
through a rigid categorical framework that breaks the Muslim space into four
distinct spaces - moderate, conservative, radical and terrorist, is problematic. Not
only does his theoretical typology not address processes of transformation, his
categorical delineations do not take into account the complex and often fluid
relations that exits bet ween different types of activism.
In terms of specific data on terrorist groups in Indonesia the many reports
of the International Crisis Group (ICG) headed by Sidney Jones represent the
forefront of practical research and have contributed much to our understanding
of groups like JI. As big an impact as Jones’s scholarship and the ICG reports
have made there are limits to the relevance of its applicability. While the reports
provide a good background, they lack depth and context and while Jones has
done much to dispel some of the editorial style analysis that exists in the field, her
w ork does not adequately address processes of violent transformation.
The radicalisation of nationalism, theology and ethnic discord, be it in Indonesia,
Sri Lanka or South Asia, has countless drivers that can be analysed on many
levels. At its core, my research seeks to harmonise and retool the existing
literature from many disciplines to present a theoretical typology that contributes
to the understanding of the radicalization process.
22
Chapter 2: Manifesting the Ummah - Rethinking Islamis m
To attempt to engage with a subject as multifaceted and complex as the
socialization process of Islamist inspired terrorists, it is logical that I begin by
engaging the theme of global Islamism, its evolution, and its impact on Indonesian
political discourse. Since the attacks of September 11 2001, there has been a
considerable amount of attention paid to the linkages bet ween the propagation of
Islamist ideology and increasing cadence of violent attacks from groups that claim
allegiance to some form of the Islamist cause. Vie wed this way, Islamist inspired
terrorism represents more than a mere law enforcement dilemma but rather vie ws
Islamism as an ideological and existential threat to the Westphalian state system.
To reinforce this message, it has become de rigeur to argue that Islamists in
Indonesia and else where reject democracy and liberalism and want to redra w the
geopolitical boundaries of the modern nation-state to either conform more
narro wly to the dictates of Islam or in the extreme re-establish the Caliphate on
either a global or regional basis. While the Islamist label is broadly accurate in
identifying certain groups of people who are committing to Islamising their
societies, this is a very broad category that is unhelpful as a discrete
categorical division and really does not say much of substance in regards to the
radicalization process of those who are committing acts of violence in the name
of Islam. Moreover, engaging in deductive logic that casts Islamism as a globally
unified predatory force, radicalising seemingly peaceful Muslim youth paints an
overly simplistic and problematic picture of the evolution and effects of the Islamist
ideology.
In essence, the Islamist label is an umbrella term used to describe a similar
but somewhat divergent set of revivalist theological interpretations of Islam that
emerged in the Middle East and Persian Gulf from the 18th to the early 20th
centuries. Thus, before we can assess the radicalising capacity of Islamist
ideology in the Indonesian context, we must first understand the evolution of
23
these Sunni revivalist movements and the many historical and current divisions
that exist within the Islamist rubric and the role that these movements played in the
evolutions of nation-states in post colonial period. By developing a more nuanced
understanding of Islamist thought, we can more accurately assess its role in the
radicalisation process.
While I do not believe it is possible to completely de-link Islamist ideology (in
its various manifestations) as a prima facie driver in the radicalisation process in
Indonesia and else where, its terms of reference are so fundamentally
misunderstood, under-theorised and over politicised that some in-depth
discussion on the use of specific terms is required before we can discuss either
the role of Islamism in the evolution of the Indonesia nation-state or the
radicalisation process of specific violent Jihadists. Essentially, this chapter will
engage several lines of discussion. First, I will introduce some broad definitions of
Islamism and the various streams that exist within the rubric of the Islamist
w orldvie w. Here I will examine role of revivalism in Islam and then address the
evolution of the major revivalist movements in Islam, most notably the puritanical
Wahhabi movement that emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, the modernist and
neo-revivalist movements that emerged in the Middle East and South Asia in 19th
Century and early 20th century, as well as the emergence of the diverse
Neofundamentalist movements of the late 20th century. Of further consideration
will be the use of descriptive short-hand terms like ‘moderate’, ‘conservative’ and
‘radical’ and an evaluation of the extent to which these categorical short-hands
reflect accurately the complex delineations that exist within the evolving global
Islamist ‘space.’
Part 1: Streams Of Sunni Theological Revivalism
While all major religions serve as a sort of blueprint for social order, the
pervasiveness of Islam as a complete system is w orthy of some discussion
24
before we look more specifically at various stream of revivalism. In analysing this
phenomenon, the noted sociologist of religion, Ernest Gellner (1979), argues that
t wo fundamental conditions favoured the greater social pervasiveness of Islam
compared to either Judaism or Christianity: its rapid and early political success,
and the idea that the divine message is complete and final (2). Gellner further
maintains the first inhibits the handing over of some sphere of life to non-religious
authority, while the second makes it that much harder to offer rival versions of
the blueprint (2). Thus from the outset, one could argue that in a society ordered
on these principels, the inherent relationship betw een the individual and
government is fundamentally different to societies where the blueprint of a
theologically inspired social order is less pervasive. While Gellner did not focus on
Indonesia as such, his insight about the connection bet ween post colonial quest
for authentic modernity modernity and radical expressions of theology bear as
much relevenace in our analysis of Indonesia as his did in French N. Africa.
For analysts and scholars looking at the phenomenon of religiosity and
processes of radicalisation, Gellner’s insight raises three important and potentially
controversial questions. First, is there something nique in Islam that, by its very
nature, posses the ability to inspire violent religiosity? Second, is the transition
from simple revivalism to violent religiosity more likely to gain traction within the
boundaries of a society whose socioreligious blueprint are unmoving? And third,
is there a causal relationship bet ween the pervasiveness of Islam as a complete
system of temporal and worldly authority and its manifestation through some
groups as a violent liberation ideology bent on redra wing the political map in its
image? I will leave the first question to theologians, philosophers and ne wspapers
columnists and attempt to engage the second and third questions by analysing the
role of history of the main Sunni revivalist movements.
Revivalism in Islam and the “Islamist ideologies” that followed were born
from central the idea that the Islamic world was in decline and should be
25
somehow reformed. The concepts of rene wal (tajdid) and reform (islah) are
fundamental doctrinal precepts in the practice of Islam rooted in both the Quran
and the Sunnh of the Prophet. Islah is a Quranic term (7:170; 11:117; 28:19) used
to describe the reform preached and undertaken by prophets when they warned
their sinful communities and called upon them to return to God’s path by
realigning their lives as individuals and communities within the norms of Sharia
(Esposito 26 1988: 117). Tajdid is based on a tradition of the Prophet: “God will
send to his umma (the Muslim community) at the head of each century those who
will rene w its faith for it” (Voll 1994). The re-new er (mujaddid) is sent at the
beginning of each century to restore true Islamic practice and thus regenerate
communities that tend, over time, to wander from the straight path (Esposito 1988:
117). The two major aspects of this process are first, a return to the idealism
revealed in the Quran and Sunna; and second, the right to practice ijtihad, to
reinterpret the source of Islam (Rippin 1990). Despite the general tendency in
Sunni Islam after the tenth century to (taqlid) the consensus of the community,
Esposito (1988) notes that great reformers or revivalists such as Abd al-Wahhab
and Ibn Taymiyya in the Arabian Peninsula and Shah Ali Wali Allah in India, all
claimed the right to function as mujtahids, practitioners of ijtihad, and thus to
reinterpret the word of the Prophet to purify and revitalize their societies (117). In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these first wave revivalists engaged in a
fundamentally internal project, that is, they were primarily concerned with
theological rene wal and criticised both excesses of the ruling Sufi class and also
the prevailing ulema’s interpretations of Islamic la w and belief, and held the vie w
that these doctrinal miss steps were to be corrected by subordination to true and
pristine Islam (118).
Wahhabism – the ‘first wave’
The Wahhabi movement is without question the best known and most influential of
26
the first wave revivalist movements. Its founder, Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab
(1703-92), was trained in law, theology, and Sufism in Mecca and Medina where
he was dra wn to the Hanbali School, the strictest of the Sunni law schools, and
to the writing of the thirteenth century Hanbali jurist, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328),
(Esposito 1988: 118). Recognising his talent for Quranic study, Wahhab’s father
sent him to study with the disciples of the Shah Wali Allah, a noted Indian
theological who had waged a revivalist campaign against the subcontinent’s Sufi
population (Aslan 2006: 241). Wahhab’s main concern was what he sa w
as the weakening of Islam by pre-Islamic tradition and the local practices of the
Bedouin tribes of central Arabia. For Wahhab, Islam’s normative period was the
time of the Prophet and early community, and post-Prophetic developments and
interpretations of the ulama and the la w schools were subject to revie w and reevaluation in the light of Islam’s fundamental sources (Esposito 1988: 118). It is
often noted that because he was in Arabia, Wahhab’s mode of revivalism was a
more literalistic recreation of the life and customs of the early Medina community,
a return to the ‘pious predecessors’ – as-salaf as-Salih – the first three
generations of the Prophet’s followers. Here, Wahhab placed particular emphasis
on the central Islamic tenant of monotheism (tawhid), and promoted a strict and
literal reading of the Quran and Sunna. His goal w as to purify Islam of what he
sa w as innovations (bid’a), blind imitation (taqlid) and idolatry (shirk) – in practice
this equated to a virtual assault on mystical and popular Islam – notably Sufism
and tradition of saint worship - and Shi’ism (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 11). For
Wahhab, this also included the veneration of Pirs, the intercession of Imams, the
commemoration of most religious holidays, and all devotional acts centred on the
Prophet Muhammed and sought to outla w certain rituals that had crept into Islam
as it spread out of the tribal confines of the Arabian Peninsula to be absorbed by
disparate cultures in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, India and Africa (Aslan
2006: 242). The Wahhabis purposefully connected their movement with the first
27
extremists in the Muslim world, the Kharijites, and like their fanatical
predecessors, focused their wrath in wards against what they considered to be
the failings of the Muslim community.
In addition to Wahhab’s ecclesiastic dialectic, his project fundamentally
questioned the dominant social and political order of the Arabian Peninsula;
challenging both the loyalty of Bedouin tribesmen to their leaders and the religious
orthodoxy vested in the Ottoman Sultanate. The noted Islamic historian, Hamid
Algar (2002), argues that had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances
under which Wahhabism emerged, it would have “passed into history as a
marginal and short lived sectarian movement.” Aslan (2006) notes that no only
w as Wahhabism a spiritually and intellectually insignificant movement founded
principally on spiritualism and intellectualism, the supposed revivalism Wahhab
w as advocating was not even considered true orthodoxy by a majority of Sunni
Muslims (243). Thus, despite the success of his missionary zeal, it is quite likely
that Wahhab’s reform movement would have remained no more than one of many
messianic movements present in this era if it were not the confluence of
geography and patronage. In terms of geography, ho wever, the Wahhabi
movement had the good fortune to emerge in the sacred lands of the Arabian
Peninsula, where it could lay claim to a powerful legacy of religious revivalism
(Aslan 2006: 243). Moreover, his strategic linkage with local tribal chief,
Muhammed Ibn Saud, is of incalculable importance in understanding the transition
of Wahhabism from a smalltime revival ideololgy to a politicised state dogma.
The al-Saud – al-Wahhab relationship would eventually evolve into a winwin alliance where the later would legitimise and help expand Ibn Saud’s political
authority over the unruly Arabian tribes, while the former would help spread
Wahhab’s hard line puritan theology (Hourani 2007: 37). Here, religious zeal and
military po wer were united in a religiopolitical movement that waged holy war on
the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula conducted by Wahhabi missionary warriors
28
w ho referred to themselves as the Ikhwan or Brotherhood. The Ikhwan destroyed
sacred tombs in Mecca and Medina, including those of the Prophet and his
companion, and also destroyed the tomb of the Shaiia martyr, Husayn, at Karbala,
a coming source on tension bet ween Sunni and Shiia communities (Esposito
1988:199). By the early t wentieth century, the consolidation of Arabian tribal
families under the al-Saud banner along, with the enmeshment of the Wahhabi or
Muwahidun (as they call themselves) ulema priestly classes into the ruling elites
through marriage, was complete. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was declared first
in 1908 and after a brief fit of resistance from the flagging Sultanate, its
independence was enshrined in 1932 after Abdul Azziz al-Saud established
diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. The coming petro wealth of the alSaud family and vast influence this would yield to their Wahhabi ulema brethren
w ould, in the coming decades, shape both the unfolding of global geo-politics and
evolution of Islam in every corner of the world – and ostensibly drive the
Saudiisation of the global neofundamentalist agenda.
Modernism – the “second wave”
While pre-modern revivalist movements such as the Wahhabis of the
Arabian Peninsula were primarily internally motivated, Islamic modernism was a
response to both continued internal weakness and to the external religio-cultural
threat of colonialism (Esposito 1988: 125). Thus the response of modern Islamic
reformers in the later 19th and early 20th centuries to the impact of the West on
Muslim societies, resulted in substantial attempts to reinterpret Islam to meet
changing circumstances where, for the first time, much of the Muslim world had
lost its political and cultural sovereignty to Christian Europe (Esposito 1988: 126).
This process was of course highlighted most famously symbolised by the
collapse of the Ottoman Sultanate. Although the Muslim world had endured the
Mongol conquests, in time the conquerors embraced Islam (ibid). Colonial rule,
29
ho wever, eclipsed the institutions of an Islamic state and society – the Sultan,
Islamic law and ulama administration of education, law and social welfare. For the
faithful, this state of affairs raised a series of existential questions on the nature
of their o wn societies like: What had gone wrong in Islam? Was the success of
the West due to the superiority of Christendom, the backwardness of Islam or the
faithlessness of the community (Esposito 1991: 126) A variety of responses
emerged to this state of affairs, ranging from adaptation and cultural synthesis to
withdra wal and rejection. Secularists blamed an outmoded tradition and
advocated the separation of religion and politics and the evolution of secular
nation-states. Thus for the great modernist thinkers of this era - Jamal al-Din-alAfghani (1839-1897), Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905), and Rashid Rida (18651935), the question was ho w to reposition Islam as western civilisation
encroached on its territory.
At the height of British colonialism, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was
fundamental in calling for internal reform to stem the tide of Western influence in
the Muslim world and attempted to bridge the gap bet ween secular modernists
and religious traditionalists. He believed that Muslims could repel the west, not by
ignoring or rejecting the sources of Western strength (science and technology),
but instead by reclaiming and reappropriating reason, science and technology,
w hich, he maintained, had been integral to Islam and the great accomplishments of
Muslim civilisations (Esposito 1988: 128). Like the Wahhabis of the Arabian
peninsula, Afghani rejected the passivity, fatalism and other worldliness of popular
Sufism together with the western secular tendency to restrict religion to personal
w orship. He countered by preaching an activist, this- worldly Islam: (1) Islam is a
comprehensive way of life, encompassing worship, law, government and
society; (2) the true Muslim struggles to carry out God’s will in history, and thus
seeks success in this life as well as the next (Esposito 1988: 128). Unlike the
Wahhabis, ho wever, Afghani argued that Islam w as a religion of both faith and
30
science - a dynamic, progressive and creative force capable of responding to the
demands of modernity (Donohue & Esposito 1982: 22). Afghani rarely spoke of
Islam solely in religious terms and thus, his greatest contribution to Islamic political
thought, was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious
associations, could be used a socio-political ideology to unite the whole of the
Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism (Aslan 2006: 230). While a member
of the Educational Council of the Ottoman Empire, Afghani came into contact with
a group of intellectuals dubbed the “Young Ottomans” and with this group,
developed a reform agenda based on fusing western democratic ideals with
traditional Islamic principles. The result was a supernationlist project, commonly
referred to as Pan-Islamism, whose principal goal was the encouragement of
Muslim unity across cultural, sectarian and national boundaries under the banner
of a single, centralised, and obviously Turkish, Caliphate (Aslan 2006: 230). In
1871, bolstered by Pan-Islamist agenda, Afghani accepted a position at Cairo’s
prestigious Al-Azhar University and while there, befriended Muhammed Abduh,
also a student at Al-Azhar University. Under the tutelage of Afghani, Abduh
published a number of books advocating a return to the unadulterated values of
the Salafs (“the pious forefathers) who founded the first Muslim community in
Medina. The two founded what would be called the Salaffiyah movement. Like
Afghani and his revivalists counterparts in the Gulf, Abduh’s immediate focus
w as on past and the supposed ‘pious forefather.’ Also like the Wahhabis, he
advocated the necessity of Ijtihad and argued that the only path to Muslim
empowerment was to liberate Islam from the grips of the Ulema and their
traditionalist interpretations of the Shariah (Aslan 2006: 232). Also like Afghani but
unlike Wahhabis, he tried to sho w that the change and modernity symbolised by
the west’s ideas and po wer were not only compatible with true Islam, they were
its necessary implications (Hourani 2007:139). While Abduh did not believe that
there needed a division in Islam between the religious and secular realms, he
31
rejected categorically the possibility of placing secular po wer in the hands of
religious clerics, whom he deemed to be unqualified to lead the Muslim community
into a new century (ibid). Instead, he advocated a recalibration of traditional
Islamic ideals such that the average citizen could understand and derive practical
meaning from. Here, he redefined shura, or tribal consultation, as representative
democracy; ijma, or consensus, as popular sovereignty; and bay’ah, or the oath
of allegiance, as universal suffrage (Aslan 2006: 232). Thus it could be argued
that he envisaged an elite, intellectually driven movement, but wanted to see the
evolution of a mass social movement that could meet the aspirational goals of a
broad spectrum of Muslim society.
Following the death of Afghani, Abduh joined forces with Rashid Rida
(1865-1935). While not considered an intellectual giant of the Islamist movement,
Rida was better known as a tactician and strategist. Following Abduh’s death in
1905, he took the Salafiyyah movement in a decidedly more conservative
direction. An admirer of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia, Rida’s dialectic was
more inclined to focus on the self-sufficiency and comprehensiveness of Islam.
Here Rida’s conservatism reflected a more restricted understanding of the term
Salaf, where for Abduh it was a reference to the early Islamic centuries; Rida
follo wed the Wahhabi interpretation that referred specifically to first generation of
Muslims and more specifically to the companions of the Prophet (Esposito 1988:
133). Where Abduh and Afghani sought to resolve the inconsistencies bet ween
the perceived differences bet ween westernisation and Islam, Rida cast his
reformism as the idiom of a defense of Islam against the dangers of the west
(Esposito 1988: 134). In this sense, Rida’s conservatisation of the Salaffiyah
movement along with his total rejection of western liberalism as a suitable
ideology for the Muslim Ummah, made his brand of Islamic Modernism quite
attractive to contemporary thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
While the Pan-Islamist movement of Afghani and Abduh did become a
32
social movement of sorts, it possessed a number of problems that fundamentally
hindered its chances of becoming a variable governing alternative with mass
appeal. First, from a structural perspective, the Salafiyyah or Pan-Islamist agenda
w as exceedingly difficult to implement because the spiritual and intellectual
diversity that had characterised the Muslim faith made the prospects of achieving
religious solidarity across well established sectarian lines very problematic (Aslan
2006: 233). Secondly, the Modernist movement as envisioned by Afghani and
Abduh fell victim to historical circumstance, as Egypt, and the Arab world
generally, struggled with the collapse of the Ottoman Sultanate, colonisation and
the perceived cultural subjugation brought on by British rule. Both the left and right
flanks of Egyptian society effectively cannibalised the Pan-Islamist movement for
their purposes. At one end of the spectrum Wahhabi activists, who sought to strip
Islam of its cultural innovations, rejected the spirit of innovation that Afghani and
Abduh had envisaged. At the other end of the spectrum, increasingly large
number of secular nationalists throughout the region found the religious ideology
of the Salafiyyah movement specifically, and Islam generally, to be incompatible
with the principal goals of modernisation: political independence, economic
prosperity and military strength (Aslan 2006: 233). Ideologically, the biggest
challenge to the modernist ideology of Afghani and Abduh would come from the
Neorevivalist challenge from groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Neo-revivalists – the third wave
It was in the shado w of the failure of the Salafiyyah movement that the
Neo-revivalist movement gained prominence. Where the modernist Pan-Islamist
movement failed to gain mass appeal, the Neo-revivalists movements, typified by
Hasan al-Bana’s Society of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Mawlana
Mawdudi’s Jamaat – I – Islami (Muslim Society) in Pakistan, sought to address the
challenges faced by the Islamic community in a different way. Like the modernist
33
movement of Afghani and Abduh, the Neo-revivalists sa w the Islamic community
of the 20th century at a critical crossroads and they acknowledged the internal
w eakness of their o wn communities, the external threat posed by westernisation
and also the inherent value of science and technology (Esposito 1988: 149).
Unlike the modernists, ho wever, the neo-revivalists were more s weeping in their
condemnation of the west and assertion of the total self-sufficiency of Islam, and
argued that Capitalism and Marxism were man made secular paths and thus alien
to the God ordained, “straight path of Islam” (Esposito 1988: 149). Ideologically,
the movement blended the world vie ws that informed the activism of the premodern revivalist groups like the Wahhabis, with the holistic vision of Islam
articulated by the modernist movement of Afghani and Abduh (Esposito
1988: 154). The result was a world-vie w that espoused Islam as a timeless faith
with a transcendent message equally valid in this world and the next.
Muslim Brotherhood is without question the era’s prototyptical
Neorevivalist organisation. Founded by Hasan al-Bana (1906-1949), an Egyptian
schoolteacher in the Suez Canal town of Ismailiyya in 1928, who like the thinkers
of the Salafiyyah movement, was also concerned with the decline of Islam and
corruption of Egyptian secular society (Shadid 2002: 49). For al-Bana the Muslim
w orld’s decline was symbolised by its acceptance of western forms of
government and laws and in particular the separation between religious
and political authority (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 13). The ans wer to this state of
affairs lay not in intellectualism of the modernist movement but in da’wa or direct
activism with a vie w to spread a message of revival in such a way that
persuaded Muslims to obey Sharia and apply its precepts to everyday life (Shadid
2002: 53). Thus, for al-Bana, the creation of an authentic ‘Islamist space’ from
within would lead to the gradual Islamisation of society through the spiritual
transformation of society. The movement’s vision, ho wever, was about
more than providing an ans wer to Egypt’s legacy of colonialism, apostasy and
34
corruption; al- Bana’s concept of the Islamic nation transcended the boundaries of
the secular nation-state and held as a prima facie goal of restoring the Caliphate.
While al-Bana did advocate the peaceful and gradual Islamisation of society, he
maintained that the Brotherhood would only assume power after the community
had come closer to true and brought about a devout Islamic community
themselves from within (Shadid 2002: 54). Al-Bana also argued that to bring about
a change in government before society itself was rene wed would be dangerous
and would cause the movement to fail.
Many analysts have commented that the genius of the Brotherhood lay not
in its ecclesiastic critique but in its ability to organise followers quickly and also
provide for their needs. The basic unit of organisation within the Brotherhood was
the cell or ‘family’ (nizam al-usar) of ten members with a leader (Bubalo & Fealy
2006: 13). Each was a member of a successfully larger unit of organisation,
reinforcing group loyalty and providing a tightly knit chain of command. In creating
an ‘Islamic space’, the Brotherhood developed into a massive political and social
machine that operated at virtually every level of Egyptian society, from health
clinics and sporting clubs to small factories and school. Al-Bana’s goal was to
demonstrate through action that he could create a complete Islamised space
within Egyptian society as an ideological alternative to that posed by the British or
their pretenders. Here, Al-Bana and his disciples were more adept than their
Modernist predecessor at politising the message of the Qu’ran to meet the needs
of an urban Colonial society and fundamentally raised the standard of ‘Islamic
modernity’ as an alternative to the ‘modernity’ of Europe (Kepel 2002: 28). The
vision of Islamic modernity proposed by al-Bana entailed a complete and total
blend of society, state, culture and religion. As such, entities like political parties,
and trade unions were fro wned upon because their quarrels disrupted the unity
of the Community of the Faithful, thus weakening its struggle with the enemies of
Islam (Kepel 2003: 28). This vie w put the Brotherhood in good stead with t wo
35
important constituencies in Egyptian society, the w orking poor and King Farouk’s
Court. For the poor and often ne wly literate, the Brotherhood’s message served
as a type of liberation ideology that transcended the staid and over-ritualised
traditionalist theology of the national Ulema. The King, on the other hand, sa w the
Brotherhood as a useful counter weight to the secular nationalists who were
challenging his authority with greater cadence (Kepel 2002: 28).
In under t wo decades, the Brotherhood transformed from a small revival
movement to a mainstream and massive social movement that became the
articulator and standard bearer of Egyptian societies' grievances, claiming a
membership base of over 500,000 members across 2,000 branches in Egypt in
alone (from just four branches in 1929) (Lapidis 2002: 522). In addition to Egypt,
the Brotherhood spread its message across the region and opened chapters in
Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Kuwait, Yemen and Sudan. While the organisation was
gradualist in its approach to the Islamisation of society, its activism in other areas
put it in the crosshairs of the successive Egyptian governments, which led
ultimately to the assassination of Al-Bana at the hands of Egyptian police in 1949
(Lipidis 2002: 522). The ascendancy of Col. Gamal Nasser's “Free Officer” regime
in July of 1952 would once again shift the dialectic of the Islamist space within the
Arab world and beyond. While initially welcomed the by the Brothers, who sa w
an opportunity in Nasser’s agenda and trusted the military as a stabilising
institution that would excise the corruption and nepotism that permeated Egyptian
society,] the honeymoon between the neo-revival agenda of the Brotherhood and
Nasser’s Pan-Arabist socialism was destined to be long-lived. Friction bet ween
the t wo groups began to surface in the early months after the revolution when it
became apparent that the Brothers' pronouncements of the need to establish a
government in Egypt on Islamic precepts were not the liking of the policy arm of
Nasser’s regime and the two camps found themselves competing for the same
grassroots support among the urban lower middle classes. (Kepel 2002: 30,
36
Mussallam 2005: 138). The struggle bet ween the Nasser regime’s Revolutionary
Command Council (RCC) and the Brotherhood came to a head on the 12th of
January 1954 at the University of Cairo, when members of the Brotherhood
attacked government negotiations with Britain over the Suez and Sudan,
describing them as a betrayal of national aspiration and further called for Jihad
against Britain (Mussallam 2005: 143). Here, the Brothers' comments on EgyptianBritish relations provided the pretext the RCC was looking for to ban the group
based on that they were a political party and thus subject to the January 1953
law that banned such entities (Mussallam 2005: 143). Following an attempt on
Nasser’s life in 1954, thegroup was summarily banned and a bulk of its leadership
structure was imprisoned, deported or executed.
The ascendance of the Free Officer regime and the subsequent banning of
the Brotherhoods precipitated a number of fundamental shifts in both the unfolding
of the Brotherhood’s agenda as well as the general trajectory of Islamism as an
effective mass social movement across the Muslim world. First, the Nasser
regime was successful in co-opting the support of the urban poor and working
class a way from the Brotherhood. While the Brotherhood’s neo-revivalist
movement gained considerable traction under the British occupation, it struggled
to keep its momentum under the tides of secular nationalism that were s weeping
across the postcolonial Arab world in the 1950s. In the face of po werful and
authoritarian socialist leaders like Nasser in Egypt and Hafez al-Asad in Syria, the
Brothers, like their modernist predecessors, struggled to shake the charge that
their ideology represented anything more than a regressive Orientalist
anachronism with a fading place in a modernising society (Kepel 2003: 30). While
the effects of the suppression on the Brothers by the Nasser regime are still a
matter of some debate, the synergistic effect of both being banned and losing
grassroots support forced the Brothers, or a subset there of, to recast their
agenda in such a way that abandoned the incrementalist approach of al-Bana in
37
favour or a more immediate and more confrontational agenda. In addition to the
changed dynamics brought on by the exclusion of the Brothers from the Egyptian
polity, the death of al-Bana esche wed another set of inter-group leadership
dynamics that sa w the Brotherhood split along ideological lines. The first post alBana leader of the Brotherhood, Hassan al-Hodeibi, a judge by trade, sought to
reintegrate the Brotherhood into the political system and end the group’s “special
section” that carried out violent attacks (Shadid 2002: 55). The crackdown of
1954 and the onset of Brotherhood’s “prison era” set the rank and file members,
especially those behind bars, on a different course – one that sa w the radical
ideologue Sayyid Qutb emerge as the group’s leader. While contemporary interest
in Qutb has been driven by the perceived links bet ween himself and ideology of al
Qaeda, Qutb is a character worthy of examination for a variety of other reasons
that transcend the mere causal connection bet w een Brotherhood thought and the
current wave of Islamist inspired violence. Qutb fundamentally turned Islamism
into a modern political ideology and one could argue further, set his interpretation
of Islamism as less a framework for theological revivalism and more a postcolonial liberation ideology that competed in the marketplace of ideals along side
those of Mao, Marx and Lenin. While it is impossible to pin specific acts of
violence to his project, his polemic certainly opened the doors to a type of
ideological discourse that advocated a direct confrontation between secular and
ecclesiastic forces within the public sphere of Muslim nations.
Like many of the leaders of the other revivalist movements, Sayyid Qutb
(born 1906) displayed an early gift for Quranic study. He eventually found work in
Egypt’s Ministry of Education and in his spare time developed his skills as a poet,
essayist and social commentator. His transformation into a religious leader
occurred while on a study trip to the United States in 1948 where he was deeply
troubled by the country’s law, immorality, materialism, sexual promiscuity and
racism. After returning to Egypt in 1951, Qutb joined the Brotherhood and in 1952
38
w as elected to the group’s Guidance Council. He then succeeded as the group’s
propaganda director (Shadid 2002: 59). Following Nasser’s 1954 crackdo wn,
Qutb was jailed and remained behind bars until 1964. He was released due to ill
health but then was quickly re-arrested and executed in 1966. Mussallam (2005)
maintains that a key juncture of Qutb’s radical transformation occurred on the 1st
of June 1957 when 21 Brotherhood members with whom he was incarcerated,
w ere executed for failing to report for daily labour duties (151). The barbarism of
this act convinced Qutb that the Nasser regime had lost any of its remaining
Muslim values and that the agenda of the Brotherhood needed to shift. While in
prison, Qutb penned five works, the best known of which, Signpost Along the
way, is often called the Islamists’ version of Lenin’s ‘What is to be done?’ This
w ork in particular represented a clear break with traditional Brotherhood thought
and cast the groups’ idiom in a decidedly radical direction. Like al-Bana, Qutb held
the belief that an Islamic state would be the first step on the bigger project to
establish the Caliphate. Qutb and his Brotherhood compatriots, ho wever, differed
significantly on the acceptable process by which society should be Islamised and
w ho should take the lead in this process. For Qutb and those influenced by his
w ork, the postcolonial development of Arab nationalism had no inherent value and
to them represented an unacceptable continuation of the European colonial project
(Kepel 2002: 25). To elaborate this theory, Qutb dre w from the Pakistani Islamist
thinker, Abu al-Mawdudi, who argued that the Subcontinent’s Muslims did not
need a state of Muslims but rather an Islamic state, ruled according to and by
those steeped in the principles of Islam (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 17). For Mawdudi, a
truly Islamic state was one that recognised only the sovereignty of God,
w orshipped God alone, and implanted God’s will – the Shari’a; and anything short
of this was jahiliya - a term used to refer to the historical period of ignorance, or
barbarism, that existed prior to the preaching of the Prophet’s word (Bubalo &
Fealy 2002: 17). Thus jahiliya can be further defined as a state in which Islam is
39
not applied or as a society that fails to adhere to its, laws, ethics, morals and
values (Shadid 2002: 59, Shepard 2003). Just like the pagan Arabs that
w orshipped idol, before the revelation of the Prophet’s word in the seventh
century AD, Qutb sa w the Muslims of the post colonial nationalist era as ignorant
of Islam since they worshipped symbolic idols such as the nation, the party and
socialism (Kepel 2002: 25). Thus it was not just Qutb’s use of the term jahiliya
that was note worthy, it was that he argued that even Muslims living under the
banner of Islam could be cast within its net. Many argue a distinct departure from
ho w Mawdudi had intended the concept be interpreted. In Milestones
Qutb writes:
The question in essence is whether one should choose belief of unbelief,
jahiliya or Islam, and whether one should worship the rivals to God or to the
Oneness of God. This ought to be made clear. Indeed, people are not Muslim,
even if they proclaim to be, so long as they live the life of jahiliya.
By linking his definition of Muslim piety with the concept of jahiliya, Qutb
opened the way for a hard-line discourse that made it possible to brand everyone
one as impious - and thus held the potential to legitimate internal jihad against
dominant Muslim societies. Historically, among both the mainstream faction of the
Brotherhood and traditional ulema in Egypt and else where, there had been an
effort avoid internal conflict or fitna, since most traditional scholars and jurists
vie wed a state of internal rebellion as worse than jahiliya itself (Bubalo & Fealy
2005: 19).
Despite Mawdudi’s influence on Qutb, many in the subcontinent were
troubled by what they sa w as a selective and inaccurate re-interpretation of
Mawdudi’s project by Qutb (Mussallam 2005: 151). Where Mawdudi’s project was
to be carried out through parliamentary and political processes, Qutb provided a
discourse for revolutionary activism. Certainly, Ma wdudi’s organisation, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, rejected any form of secular nationalism as an appropriate
40
model of governance, and also wanted to erode the influence of the pluralistic
Sufism that had long held s way over the subcontinent’s Muslim population.
This project, ho wever, was to be carried out in much the same way as the early
Brotherhood leaders had envisaged – through gradual acceptance from the
bottom up. Qutb, however, used the basis of Maw dudi’s project (the concept of
Jahiliya) to justify the revival of Islam to be carried out by an Islamic tali’ah or
vanguard who job it would be to Islamise society in their image from the top down
(Mussallam 2005: 155). For Qutb, the first step in the process was personal
purification, to actually rid oneself of the Jahili ideas, while contemplating the
true nature of Islam. After this process was complete, then the tali’ah manifested
to overthro w the jahili society. While he discussed at length the need for
personal purification, it would seem that in his final assessment the external
struggle,or Jihad, won out over the need for internal purification. Thus he
concluded that it could only be through direct physical force that the political,
social and economic obstacles would be removed to establish a true Islamic
community (Mamdani 2004: 57).
Due to Qutb’s early execution, there is still some debate over some of the
finer points of his dialectic. For his ideological heirs, three distinct interpretations
emerged from his project. The first and most extreme considered that impiety was
endemic all over the world, except among the Islamist vanguard, and pronounced
everyone else as Takfir or infidels (Kepel 2002: 25). The second interpretation
confined the takfir label to rulers of the state, w ho were condemned as takfirs for
failing to implement mass Islamisation in the Qutbist vision. In this interpretation, all
other believers were spared their violent wrath. The third interpretation
ameliorated the most controversial passages in Qutb’s work by suggesting that
his writings on jahiliyah should be understood in a metaphoric not literal sense
(Kepel 2002: 25). Despite that first t wo interpretations succeeded in influencing a
ne w generation of violent revivalists, a majority of mainstream Brotherhood
41
members adopted the third interpretation and eventually recognised Hassan alHodeibi as the group’s spiritual leader. While al-Hodeibi did not reject completely
the work of Qutb, he maintained the core mission of the Brotherhood was to
sho w the Muslim world, through da’wa, how to become more Islamic. Thus their
mission was to preach and not condemn through internal violence (Kepel 2002:
32).
Neofundamentalism – the “fourth wave”
In assessing the capacity of theological revivalism as the prima facie agent
in the radicalisation process of the Islamist terrorist, the ascendancy the
neofundamentalism in the 1960s and 1970s represents a critical juncture and
radical departure from the three previous waves of revivalism looked at thus far.
Where the first three waves of Islamist revivalism can be traced to specific
people, individual ideological projects and particular geographic circumstances,
the neofundamentalist turn, contains no such categorical discipline. In this
sense it would be more appropriate to define the characteristics of
neofundamentalism in terms of its ideological and geographic fragmentation rather
than its adherence to any one single ideological project. It is also important to note
that while we discuss neofundamentalism as a manifestation of Islamic revivalism,
w hich it is to some extent, many of the symptoms we associate with Islamic
neofundamentalism, namely the resentment of secular culture as an anathema of
pure faith, are not unique to Islam but symptomatic of the trajectory of religiosity
across all faiths as a response to both the problems of post industrial modernity
and the failure of the secular nation-state to deliver goods to certain groups of
people. In the wake of this failure, we have seen the rise of radicalised religious
movements from a plurality of religious traditions including: the spread of
messianic Protestantism among Catholics in South America, the increased
popularity of ultra-Orthodox Labuvich Judaism among the Jewish community in
North America, and among the eastern faiths, the rise of the Sokka Gekkai
42
Buddhist movement in Japan together with various Hindu sects in India. Certainly
the particulars of these different neofundamentalisms differ and not all are violent,
but we do see basic similarities in their calls for the rejection of both secular
nationalisms and of mainstream religious ideology (Roy 2004: 74-75).
In addressing this phenomenon in the Muslim context, we are presented
with an interesting set of conceptual challenges. Most importantly, there is the
need to apply the right framework to assess the connection bet ween the various
Muslim manifestations of neofundamentalism and their connections to processes
of transformation in the radicalization process of those willing to commit acts of
extreme violence in its name. In looking for ans w ers to rise of Jihadism and other
acts of violent Jihadism over recent years, there has been a barrage of analysis
that has portrayed neofundamentalism as both the state ideology of al Qaeda and
as a socio-cultural offshoot of Saudi Arabian Wahhabi “Salafism.” Certainly the
connection bet ween the austere Saudi ulema, Wahhabism and various elements
within the neofundamentalist rubric are well know n and important to consider. The
real innovation in this phenomenon lies in the very nature of neofundamentalism
itself – as a deterritorialised and decontextualised form of religiosity that exists
free of any geographic centre and is disconnected from any overarching
institutional affiliations (Roy 2004). Thus it would be a vast over simplification of
the facts to attempt to explain the rise of neofundamentalism in terms of Saudi
patronage alone. Above all else, neofundamentalism calls for the creation of the
global ummah, that exists beyond the confines of ethnicity, race, language and
culture and is thus no longer embedded in a specific territory (Roy 2004: 272). So
w hat then does the ummah in the neofundamentalist conception look like? Even
among Muslim neofundamentalists it varies, but for organisations such as Hizbut
ut-Tahrir, the caliphate they imagine is not a reenactment of a historical institution
and there is no precise location imagined. Rather, the point is that the Caliphate
will rule over all Muslims, not over a given territory (Roy 2004: 275). At this stage
43
it is necessary to more narro wly define ho w we employ the term Salafi and not
get confused with the dual applications of this term in the context of Islamist
revivalism. As I discussed in the previous section on Modernism, the term was
initially employed by Afghani and represented a call to the return of the true tenets
of Islam as a means of castigating the backwardness of the religious
establishment rather than simply a call for regressionist cultural practices like the
w holesale application of Sharia La w (Roy 2004: 233). In this sense, there is no
connection bet ween the Salafism of Saudi Wahhabi Ulema or Taliban and Afghani
or even Hasan al-Banna.
Having addressed the ideological tenets of neofundamentalism on an
esoteric level, the questions begs as to what practically separates
neofundamentalism from the previous forms of revivalism this chapter has dealt
with? Thus, what separates an Islamist (modernist or neo-revivalist) from a
neofundamentalist? On the surface there are definite similarities. Both cling to a
form of religiosity that rejects the idea of different interpretations of the word of
the Prophet and maintains that they are the sole arbiters of piety in the Muslim
context. To some extent, both envisage a re-Islamisation of Muslim lands based on
hard-line ideological precepts through elements like the strict adoption of Sharia
law. The similarities bet ween the t wo factions have been the source of some
confusion for those analysing the radicalization processes in different parts of
the world. Roy (2004) maintains that the dividing line between neofundamentalism
and other forms of revivalism lies in differing positions over the state and politics
(247). He argues that neofundamentalists reject political struggle as a means to
achieve an Islamic state and believe that an Islamic state should result from the reIslamisation of the Ummah and not be used as a tool of it (Roy 2004: 247). In this
sense, neofundamentalists would oppose both moderate and radical Islamists,
particularly the modernists, to the extent that they use political processes to
achieve their vision of a society ordered strictly on Islamic precepts. In so much
44
as both Islamists (modernists and neorevivalists) and neofundamentalists agree
that the enemy is the west, they propose very different ideas on ho w to respond.
The neofundamentalists’ ans wer is usually da’wa and sometimes Jihad, but never
political action. The Islamists’ ans wer is for the creation of Islamic states. Here
Roy’s framework highlights the need to differentiate bet ween groups like
Hezbollah or Hamas who would be characterised as strictly Islamist in both
means and methodology, and groups like the Taliban, Hibut ut’Tarrir and Jemmat eIslammiy who would more closely meet the definition of prototypical
neofundamentalist organisations. Thus for analysts looking to explain processes
of radicalisation through the lens of neofundamentalist ideology alone, these
categorical distinctions present some complications. In observing Hamas and
Hezbullah, we encounter groups that have proved highly adept at radicalising
their populations and have sho wn a willingness to use violence justified in the
name of Islam to achieve their o wn political ends – especially through the
deployment of suicide attacks. Despite their penchant for violent activism, neither
group is neofundamentalist in nature; both have distinct political agendas attached
to secular national liberation struggles. Similarly, the idiom of violence as
represented by groups like the Taliban, al Qaeda and Jemmah Islamiyah can
certainly be attributed to the neofundamentalist rubric but so too can the project of
many other groups that, while ‘conservative,’ reject violence as a means to an
end. In this sense violence is not necessarily implicit to the neofundamentalist
w orldvie w and hence one must differentiate betw een people and groups that
simply adopt neofundamentalist agendas, and those that that advocate collective
violent Jihad. Put simply, not all Jihadists are neofundamentalists and not all
neofundamentalists are Jihadists. Moreover, not all groups that call for the hard
line Islamisation of Muslim lands agree that this project can be carried out violently.
Further categorisation within the neofundamentalist rubric gets even more difficult
for the simple fact that the many self-styled Salafi preachers do not consider
45
themselves Wahhabis and reject any connection to the ulema of the Saudi nationstate. Similarly, many of the Tablighi groups in South Asia are neofundamentalist in
w orldvie w but do not consider themselves to be either Wahhabi or Salafi.
In terms of assessing the historical antecedents that led to the evolution of
neofundamentalism as a globalised discourse of religiosity, there are several key
strategic dynamics worthy of examination including: the rise of Petro-Islam driven
by Saudi oil wealth beginning in the 1960s, the subjugation of the Brotherhood
from the mid-1950s on wards, and the geopolitical realities of the Cold War.
Despite the importance of these events, there are t wo necessary caveats in the
analysis. First, determining the extent to which processes of radicalisation are
driven by macro systemic political issues is difficult. Certainly there are groups of
Muslims who live under the yoke of brutal authoritarianism that do not get seduced
by violent religiosity. This fact not withstanding, I maintain that the rampant
corruption and the inability of various secular regimes across the region to deliver
on promises of economic development and democratisation have on some level
created a ne w and reinvigorated space for the Islamist message. Second, while
w e focus on events in the Arab world here, we must also consider that one of
the real innovations in neofundamentalism has been its ability to attach itself to
local grievances in every part of world. Thus, by framing neofundamentalism
solely in the Arab context, we miss the complexity of the phenomenon as a
decontextualised form of religiosity that does not need a centre to function. Here
w e see that the t wo largest and best known neofundamentalist movements, the
Tablighis and Wahhabis, had, until the 1960s, a very limited territorial basis (in the
Indian Subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula respectively) but through
extensive da’wa activity, and a series of other geopolitical dynamics, their
message has gained a global audience void of a geographic centrer (Roy 2004:
235).
As I have discussed at some length already, the release and deportation of
46
large numbers of incarcerated Brotherhood preachers from Egypt and then
Syria’s prison system, sa w neofundamentalism proliferate around the globe in a
w ay that previous revivalists movements had not succeeded in accomplishing. As
an incubator of this phenomenon, the connection to Saudi Arabia is important to
consider. Starting in the late 1950s, Brotherhood members began arriving in the
Kingdom and availed themselves as preachers and civic organisers. Among other
things, the original group, including Sayyid Qutb’s brother Muahammed, played an
instrumental role in the founding of the University of Medina in 1961 and
contributed to the creation of a formal Islamic banking system (Kepel 2003: 51).
On an intellectual level, the Brothers infused in the Saudi ulema an interest in
external da’wa activities that had previously not existed, and played a key role in
establishing the no w banned Muslim World League in 1963, the first organisation
established with the goal of using the full (and virtually unlimited) resources of the
Saudi State to Wahhabise global Islam. Here, the Wahhabi Ulema capitalised on the
Brotherhood’s organisational capacity to propagate its brand of austere Islam
around the world. This had been achieved through a dual course of building
Mosques and madrasas and supporting social w elfare organisations. Doing this
also set up many generous scholarship programs to bring young men into the
Kingdom to train as Wahhabi Imams who would then return to their countries of
origin. While the Saudi’s deny the charge that they actively tried to
“Wahhabise”global Islam, at the very least they have actively propagated
Deobandi ideology through Pakistani Madrasas, a fact that demonstrates the
reach of Saudi influence (Roy 2004: 236). Ultimately the relationship bet ween the
Qutbist Brotherhood and the Wahhabi ulema evolved into a symbiotic relationship
w here one fundamentally shaped the development of the other; the Brothers in
the Kingdom became more interested in conservative cultural practices like the
application of harsh interpretations of Sharia Law , while the Saudi Ulema, through
Brotherhood preaching, became interested in using their vast oil wealth to expand
47
da’wa activity beyond the traditional confines of the Gulf. Brothers infused
Wahhabism with a worldly activism and helped transform its message into a form
of radicalised political discourse. This reality was unquestionably heightened by
the virtue of the special status the Saudi state occupies as a custodian of the t wo
holiest cities in Islam. This is not to say that the Wahhabi’s were not interested in
da’wa before the arrival of the Brother; for centuries Mecca had been a centre of
learning that attracted students from around the w orld, but the Wahhabi more
typically acted through the issuance of fatwas rather than da’wa activities.
On the surface, the connection bet ween the Saudis and formerly
imprisoned Brotherhood ideologues seems an unlikely fit, especially given Qutb’s
advocacy of revolution and his denunciation of regimes, including those in the
Gulf, as apostates to Islam. Members of the political and religious establishment in
the Kingdom, however, ameliorated this vie w on the grounds that the more
‘revolutionary’ aspects of Qutb’s polemic were formed under the torturous
conditions of Nasser’s prisons (Kepel 2003: 51). Above all else, the acceptance
of the Brotherhood members was part of an on-going ‘grand bargain’ between the
Wahhabi Ulema and the al-Saud family. During this period, Saudi Arabia was
modernising at a very rapid rate and to maintain the support of the Wahhabi
Ulema, the al-Saud family had to grant certain concessions to the clergy. While the
political elites maintained some reservations about this arrangement, the influx of
hard line preachers helped achieve the larger goals of solidifying the religious
credentials of the ruling family in the eyes of the ulema while boosting the Islamic
profile of the Saudi nation-state in the region – a perennial concern for the al-Saud
family. In addition to pleasing the Wahhabi Ulema, it is quite likely that the
longstanding Egyptian-Saudi rivalry also played its part in fueling Saudi support for
the Brothers. To this day, the t wo nations enjoy an uneasy strategic relationship
and both vie for cultural, political and ecclesiastic ste wardship of the Sunni world.
No doubt during the 1960s, Saudi elites took some pleasure in causing Egyptian
48
angst by allowing Brotherhood preachers to rail against Nasser’s socialism from
pulpits all over the Kingdom.
The Saudi-Egyptian bacchanal was symbolic of much more than just a
parochial feud over domination of the Sunni world. From the 1960s on wards, the
unfolding of neofundamentalism was imbued with a distinct geo-strategic context
in which regional domination of the Sunni world played a supporting role to the
cosmic fight of the day bet ween capitalism and communism. Saudi Arabia was
under Washington’s sphere of influence while Nasser, a ‘socialist’, ultimately
settled on the Soviet Union, and far from being w orried about the long-term
prospects of Islamist religiosity, Washington came to vie w the Wahhabi ulema and
the propagation of Deobandi conservatism as a key regional bulwark against the
godless heathenism represented by Soviet Union (Kepel 2003). From the late
1960s on wards, both the Saudi rulers and their w estern protectors sa w the utility
in corporatiszing elements of the neofundamentalist space into the broader geostrategy of Cold War policy planning. I will discuss this phenomenon in the
Indonesian context at length in the coming chapters but it is interesting to note that
this is a trend that would be replicated across the Muslim world, from Saudi
Arabia, to Pakistan, Turkey and through Southeast Asia. It was generally believed
that the forces of neofundamentalism could be contained within existing political
arrangements and that the actors could be “managed” in way to serve the greater
interests of both the state and Cold War geo-politics. In the short term, the
strategy worked but ultimately the alliance of convenience bet ween the
neofundamentalists and nation-states could not last. To witness the evidence of
this failure one need only look at the current security dilemmas faced by both
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Both nations actively nurtured strains of violent
neofundamentalism for their o wn institutional ends and then lost control of the
experiment. Now, we have a situation in several countries where the “terrorist”
genie has been let out of bottle and the forces once nurtured by the state no w
49
actively challenge its legitimacy- through both direct violence and the propagation
of non-violent albeit revolutionary ideas. In Pakistan, the headquarters of the Ahl-Ihadith movement, the military of branch of Lashkar e-Toiba, was a built on a plot
of land donated to the grouppersonally by General Zia ul-Haq (Roy 243). In
addition to supporting the Taliban Ahl-Ihadith has established a large net work of
Madrasas and helped sustain the Kashmiri Jihad (Roy 2004: 243). The examples
presented from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan beg an important and difficult set of
questions around ho w best to respond to radicalised religiosity when it becomes
institutionalised and embedded in the fabric of the nation-states themselves.
Perhaps many of the missteps in the management of the global war on terror stem
from not asking the right questions on this theme.
Without question, the corporatisation of neofundamentalism was most
starkly witnessed in the collective response to the Soviet invasion to Afghanistan
in 1979. Notwithstanding Roy’s keen observation that ‘neofundamentalist Jihadists’
fight not to protect a specific territory but to re-create a community – the imagined
Caliphate’ (Roy 2004: 289), the experience of the Afghan Jihad succeeded in both
territorialising and contextualising the neofundamentalist struggle in a way that no
previous struggle had. Thus, on both a symbolic and practical level, the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in capturing the imagination of elements within
the global Muslim community that created an unlikely set of short-term alliances.
Based on demands of po wer politics driven by a number of realities, these
relationships reflected a number of realities including: regional and ethno-religious
rivalries, the desire of some regimes to export their neofundamentalist
communities to the battle fields of Afghanistan and of course, the desire of
neofundamentalist and Wahhabi ideologues to make manifest their ideology in the
w orld. With the continued failure of Islamist revivalism as a mass movement
across the Muslim world, the project to defend the majesty of the faith against a
superpo wer was the exact sort of Pan-Islamist confrontational project that the
50
Qutbist idealogues like al Qaeda number t wo, Ayman al-Za wahiri, had envisaged.
The resistance to Soviet occupation was conducted around t wo competing sets
of relationships; the first was the Suni-Pashtun alliance financed by the Saudis,
organised by Pakistan’s intelligence service and carried out by the dominant
Panshtun tribes in Afghanistan and the tribal Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA) region of Pakistan, and eventually armed by the United States (US). The
second was the Iranian-Uzbek alliance manifested through Tehran’s support for
Ahmad Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance. In an effort to contain Iranian perceived
designs on regional hegemony, the US and its allies largely, though not entirely,
backed the Neofundamentalist Sunni volunteers. The response took a variety of
forms including: humanitarian assistance, logistical support and the influx of
thousands of foreign volunteers into the region. The project to corporatise
neofundamentism to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan would have deep and
long lasting consequences for the r egion’s political order and for the
advancement of the Islamist agenda in many parts of the world. Following the
withdra wal of the Soviet Union, the Uzbek-Pashto rivalry, ostensibly stroked by
competing regional powers, devolved into all out civil war bet ween the Uzbek and
Pashton forces (Rougier 2007). Into the ethno-tribal rivalries, the enmeshment of
Pashto tribal nationalism with neofundamentalist Islam ultimately yielded the
ascendance of the brutal Taliban government, and more generally succeeded in
radicalising the tribal politics of the region, particularly in Pakistan’s FATA (Rougier
2007). For the foreign Islamist volunteers, the Afghan experience was an
exercise in mass empowerment and the Mujahideen’s perception that they alone
drove the Soviet’s out of the Afghanistan helped to set t wo important plays in
motion. First, their perceived victory helped inspire, practically and idelogically, the
Islamisation of various ethno-political and national liberation struggles in Southeast
Asia and Central and North Africa in 1990s. On an operational level, there is ample
evidence to suggest that the veterans of the Afghan Jihad did return to their
51
countries of origin and served as organisers and fixers in various Islamist
causes. Second, the Mujahideen’s phantom victory helped solidify the perception
among some of neofundamentalist Islamism as a potent postmodern liberation
ideology- a project that could be deployed else w here (Rougier 2007). Where the
previous ideological trajectory of the revivalist movements had been internal in
nature, the experience of defeating a superpo w er certainly provided a greater
confidence for those that wanted to stir a broad ideological and civilisational
confrontation. Despite the effect of the Afghan experience in radicalising foreign
volunteers, we must be nuanced in dra wing causal linkages bet ween the
success of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen and increased spasms of Jihadist violence
that have taken place in the past fifteen years. In this sense it would be
problematic to dra w the conclusion that the Afghan experience was a prima facie
driver in the radicalization process. Completely unrelated to the Afghan
experience, 1989 sa w the acendency of Omar al-Bashir and hardline Islamist
ideologue, Hassan al Turabi, in Sudan. While there is ample anecdotal evidence to
suggest that the Afghan Mujahideen did succeed in energising elements of the
movement, this rise could also be explained by a host of other factors such as the
end of global bipolarity, globalisation and calls for deomocratisation in a number of
nation-states.
By the early 1990s, the ‘neofundamentalist space’ morphed into three
similar but essentially contrasting visions of itself as a self-help ideology. Even
among those who took Qutb’s vie w that an elite vanguard should take it upon
itself to end the Jahaliyyah state and establish the Caliphate, a clear cleavage
emerged bet ween those that wanted to use the experience of the Afghan victory
to justify further confrontations to challenge the political legitimacy of “apostate
leaders” in Muslim world, and those who just wanted to continue to use the
Mujahhideen as tool of absolute last resort to help embattled Muslims in different
parts of the world. The latter is, of course, most infamously represented by
52
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Za wahiri, who cast the gaze of their Jihad on the
al-Saud family first and then, when that agenda failed, s witched to the United
States. The former category is represented by a plurality of groups who
attempted with varying degrees of success to Islamise a variety of ethno-religious
conflicts in Central and Southeast Asia in the 1990s. The trend here seemed
to be that where trajectory of activism was limited in scope to just defending
Muslims “under siege”, they achieved some success, but where the agenda
extended to broad Islamisation of society, they lost support. In Indonesia for
example, Laskar Jihad founder, Jafar Umar Thalib gained great public creditability
in justifying his Jihad against Christians in Aceh by touting his Mujahideen
experience (Stern 2003). The indigenous populations, ho wever, proved to be
less interested in the broader neofundamentalist agenda.
Contrasting Bin Laden and Za wahiri's style of violent Jihad against Jahilyi
Muslims and non-Muslims alike on the one hand and the type of proto-Islamic
“Jihad for hire” seen in places Chechnya and Aceh on the other, the second
reaction to the post Afghanistan epoch sa w the resurgence of a type of
Modernist project that was attempted decades earlier. In Muslim majority secular
nation-states like Turkey and Indonesia for example, this form of Islamisation
manifested through a variety of mechanisms including rise of Islamic study groups
on University campuses, a rise in Muslim identity politics in popular and political
culture, and a resurgence of Islam at an electoral level. In addition to these
vehicles of expression, this era also witnessed the rise of various forms of
alternative ‘self-help’ and personal empowerment movements – akin to the New
Age movement in west. Thus during this period, Muslim religiosity took many
forms.
The response to this phenomenon on the part of secular nation-states is
interesting and worthy of some discussion. In Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco,
Islamic participation in the nation-state took a variety forms ranging from electoral
53
participation from groups like the Brotherhood to violent attacks on tourists by
Qutbist factions like Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). In all cases, these movements
w ere violently put do wn by secular authorities. In the case of Algeria, the
response to the electoral success of an Islamist party was met with a military
putsch that sa w the onset of a bloody decade-long civil war. In the Algerian and
Egyptian contests the argument could be made that a brutal response to the
Islamist voice in the political spectrum elicited an even nastier response on the
part of those who were excluded. The inability of these states to integrate Muslim
expression into secular political discourse has in many cases created more
security problems than suppressing the groups has solved.
The third reaction to the post Afghanistan environment was neither political
and nor was it immediately confrontational to non-Muslims. Here, we see both a
continuation and deviation in the traditional forms of neofundamentalism discussed
earlier. Many of the neofundamentalist groups (like Hizbut Tarir) remained
decidedly A-political and continued to focus on da’wa and encouraged their
follo wers to withdra w from the secular nation-state project (Hussain 2006). Their
focus was internal and rather than violently oppose secular government, various
neofundamentalist Salafi groups, including Hibut Tarir and Tablighi groups in South
Asia, directed their attention inwards and re-focused their energies on Islamising
their o wn communities in their image. In pursuing this policy, the intent was first to
attempt to conservatise pluralistic groups like Sufis and other moderate secular
minded civil-society groups, and if that did not w ork, then to intimidate them into
silence or submission. This state of affairs has been highlighted by a number of
troubling events including: the takeover of the Finsbury Park Mosque in London by
Salafi elements in 1995, the execution of Theo Van Gogh, and the harassment of
Somali-Dutch politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Thus while more research needs to be
done of the precise links bet ween the radicalised rhetoric of the
neofundamentalist agenda and its connection in radicalising terrorists themselves,
54
neofundamentalism has sho wn itself to have a deleterious effect on intercommunal relations within Muslim communities and in societies where Muslims are
the minority within the majority community.
It is also important to consider that during this period, neofundamentalism’s
ideological centre of gravity shifted from the Middle East to South Asia and
Europe. Here, self-styled Salafi preachers, like Shiek al-Masri and Omar Abel
Rachman (the blind sheik), began to demonstrate their appeal to very small but
loyal bands of young followers especially among mainly migrant and secondgeneration migrant communities in Western Europe. Rather than being beholden to
the Wahhabi ulema in the way that the first generation of ex-Brotherhood
neofundamentalist preachers were, ho wever, these ‘independent contractors’
ans wered only to their communities and in many cases, as political dissidents
themselves, these religious leaders actually harboured severe animosity to wards
secular leadership structures across the Muslim and particularly Arab worlds
(Hoffman 2006). Further entrenching the position of neofundamentalism as a
deterritorialised phenomenon, the increased trend of globalisation fuelled by
gro wth of the Internet enabled certain preachers to develop bases of support far
outside their places of residence (Hoffman 2006). The devolution of
neofundamentalism into hands of DIY preachers was further complicated by the
geo-political realities of the 1990s, which irrevocably blurred the line between the
rejections of the secular nation-state in a neutral way, as had previously been the
case, and rejection of the nation-state because of perceived anti-Islamic policies.
This shift in thinking was represented most significantly by the presence of US
(kafir) forces in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War in 1991. In this dynamic,
neofundamentalist preachers who operated outside the ecclesiastic control of
any single institution, proved to present a security problem where these
preachers had recruitment bases for Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies and well as
others in the Balkans.
55
Identity and Labels
In delineating and unpacking the evolution of a phenomenon as complex as
Islamic revivalism that spans continents and centuries, categorical shorthand
descriptive terms like revivalist, modernist, neo-revivalist and neofundamentalist
are both useful and problematic. They are useful because such labels do provide
a theoretical framework and accurately denote the many real cleavages in
thought, means and methodology. There is a danger, ho wever, in clinging too
closely to these labels especially when we are looking to assess the role that
Islamist ideology plays informing the transformation process of those who adopt
an idiom of violence. Not only do Islamist and neofundamentalist movements often
reflect different approaches to politics (and to the use of violence), but often
adapt and indigenise the ideas of their Islamist counterparts. Traditional categories
of radical and conservative do not necessarily hold true. The Muslim
Brotherhood’s ideas about the transformation of society are quite radical while the
means they use to achieve this transformation have been largely mainstream. By
contrast, al Qaeda’s worldvie w reflects that conservatism of its Salafi
underpinnings yet its activism is more in line with Muslim Brotherhood ‘modernist’
thinking.
The dividing line between garden variety Islamists and neofundamentalists,
w hile clear on specific issues, does not reflect the reality of groups and
individuals who operate in complex and shifting environments. Many Brotherhood
members ended up making the jump from social activism to violent rejection of the
state, but because they had Qutbist predilections, they fit quite well with the
neofundamentalist agenda. Yet other groups have s witched tracks from neorevivalists to neofundamentalists (and then back again) simply because that is
56
w here they perceived the momentum lay (Roy 2004: 251). For example,
Mawdudi’s Jemaat I-Islammi jumped on the neofundamentalist band wagon and
joined forces with Muttaahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) – a coalition of pro Taliban
movements (ibid). Having won elections in the North-West Frontier province in
2002, the MMA has been pushing a neofundamentalist agenda – implementing
Sharia, banning television and films – all without consulting the Islamabad. As
highlighted earlier, some Islamist groups other wise opposed to aspects of the
neofundamentalist message head in that direction after they are kept from
exercising state po wer.
Conversely, there have many examples where Brotherhood members who
have rejected the call the call for the creation of an Islamic State do not actually
make the complete ideological jump to neofundamentalism and prefer instead to
focus on ethical issues rather than on the broad implementation of Sharia. Sheikh
al-Qarada wi is one such leader who has been labeled a sort of a conservative
liberal (Roy 2004: 253). He issued a fat wa condemning the September 11 attacks
and has subsequently been removed from the neofundamentalist groups for being
too pro western. As Roy (2004) notes:
the blurring of the lines bet ween the Muslim Brother, neofundamentalists and
conservatives has political and strategic dimensions …, How does on assess the
threats of finding possibilities of finding stablising elements among conservative
Muslims when the reciprocal instrumentalisation of Saudi Arabia and Muslim
Brothers to counter Arab Nationalism, Communism and Iranian Islamism in 1980s
paved the way for more radical movements (254).
Similarly the use of more general shorthand labels like moderate,
conservative and radicals also pose methodological problems for the analyst
looking to assess the role of religiosity in the socialisation process of terrorists. To
separate the good Muslims from the bad Muslims, we have developed very broad
categorical shorthand that is accurate to some extent but also presents some
w orrying trends. Most troubling is the use of the term 'radical'. A sort of defacto
meaning has emerged on what the word means in the context of Islamism. In
57
sense, the term 'Islamism' has been securitised to the point where it and
radicalism can be used interchangeably. The question is, do we treat radicalism
as a unique worldvie w or as a set of methods? Should symbolic radicalism – that
is radicalism that is not attached to any plan of implementation, be treated equally
to radical rhetoric that is backed by action? How much time should we spend
analysing the radicalism of the rhetorical variety? And is there connection
bet ween the t wo? Thus are people who engage in rhetorical radicalism more ikely
to engage in the real thing? In this context, radical Islam is not a discrete category
and often springs from the same matrix as other forms of Islamist expression.
Thus it and moderate Islam cannot be clearly and unambiguously separated, so
that the social categories of ‘Muslim democrats’ and ‘Muslim radicals,’ are not, in
some respects, sharply opposed (Wiktoro wicz 2004). Thus, presenting Islam in
terms of t wo fundamental categories of a radical faction and a moderate one
containing the vast majority of ordinary, ‘mainstream’ Muslims, though not totally
untrue in some respects, suggests an imperviousness of these categories (Sidel
2007).
Equally problematic is the use of the term 'moderate'. Is a moderate simply
someone who has definite beliefs (in Islam) and is not a radical? Moreover, in the
context of Islamism (or any other faith system for that matter) it is not possible to
employ 'moderate' means to achieve very fanatical ends? Thus someone could be
radical in vision but at the same time be moderate in methodology. Most
w orryingly, what happens when societies' goal posts get shifted so far to the
right the moderate centre is unrecognisable? Above all else, who decided
w hat the contours and benchmarks of moderation and radicalism are? Should this
be within the purvie w of the nation-state, secular civil society or religious
authorities?
58
Conclusion
At the beginning of this chapter I cited the work of Ernest Gellner and posed t wo
questions, first I asked whether the transition from simple revivalism to violent
religiosity was more likely to gain traction within the boundaries of a society
w hose socio-religious blueprint is unmoving? Thus, do conservative societies
produce intolerant people and are these people more susceptible to radicalisation?
And second, is there a causal relationship bet w een the pervasiveness of Islam
as a complete system of temporal and worldly authority and its manifestation
through some groups as a violent liberation ideology bent on redra wing the
political map in its image. In this chapter I have engaged with those questions by
tracing the development and evolution of Islamic revivalism in a global context. In
this context, it has been my intent to demonstrate that by discussing both the
evolution and the plurality of voices that exist within the Islamist rubric, we can
begin to asses the role that various manifestations of revivalism have played in
the socialising process of those willing to commit acts of violence in the name of
Islam. My lack of specific discussion on Indonesia here has been deliberate. After
all, Islamism (in all its manifestations) touts itself as a globalised liberation ideology
and as such, I believed it necessary to explore its inception and development at a
global level first.
In regards to the first question I posed, from the point of vie w of the
content explored in this chapter, pinning the transition from simple revivalism to
violent religiosity on the nature of Islam itself seems quite difficult. Islam, like every
other religion, sells its self as a complete package and despite the project to
decontextualise the practice of Islam from the cultures where it has taken root,
there seems to be little mass interest in this agenda. Furthermore, revivalism
evolved as a mechanism to deal with a series of challenges, first the
internal weakness of the Islamic civilisation compared to its peers and then its
domination by western colonial powers. At its core, all of these revivalist
59
theologies, in one way or another, imagine that internal unity is a precondition to
either repel or emulate the powers that stifle its rightful influence. To achieve this
unity a variety of responses emerged, ranging from straightjacket of Wahhabism
to the more pluralist style of Modernism to the confrontational style of the
Brotherhood and the elite Islamising vanguard of Qutb. Here it would very
problematic to dra w the conclusion that a) the ideologies within the Islamist
actually talk to one another, and b) that Islam is a gate way ideology where one
form of religious expression will ultimately lead to another more sinister form of
expression.
In regards to the second question, an ans wer in the affirmative is more
plausible but still quite difficult. Perhaps Islamism has the ability to upset more than
challenge strategic orders? Many within the Islamist space certainly envisage
theirs as a liberation ideology capable of delivering the goods where the
capitalism, secularism and westernism have failed. Moreover, neofundamentalist
machinations about the establishing the Caliphate, even if it is a deterritorialised
one, comes from scripture and could present the appearance of giving its
adherents a righteousness and justification they might not other wise have had.
Even more convincingly, the increasingly aggrieved and confrontational nature of
neofundamentalist discourse over the past decade may suggest a worrying trend
and perhaps justify the assertion that Islamism is a prima facie agent of
radicalisation. Smoke does not always mean fire, ho wever, and we must be
nuanced in dra wing conclusions even from seemingly convincing evidence. As
this chapter has demonstrated, Islamic revivalism in all its manifestation has
failed as a mass movement for social change. While various movements have
been able garner popular support initially, they have largely been unable to
maintain it. This is has led to frustration and in case of ideologues like Sayyid
Qutb, justified revolutionary tactics to violently and involuntarily Islamise societies
that were not coming along voluntarily. From this one can dra w the conclusion
60
that violence and popular support seems to be inversely proportionate. The case
of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) demonstrates this point. In addition to the troop serge
ordinary, it was that ordinary Iraqis gre w tired of AQI’s idiom of violence and
intimidation that has seen the number of suicide bombings drop.
In looking at processes of radicalisation, more w orrying than the trajectory
of Islamism itself is the response of nation-states to this phenomenon. Majority
Muslim nation states have s wung wildly bet ween either repressing Islamists on
the one hand or co-opting them for political purposes on the other. As case
studies from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan demonstrate, corporatisating radical
elements is certainly not a strategy that yields good outcomes; and while stoking
the fires of neofundamentalism may yield short-term geopolitical gains, it more
often than not ends up creating security problems for nation-states. Similarly, the
Syrian approach of treating Islamism like a cancer that has to be removed does
not work. Thus mass executions and torture may solve this problem in the short
term but serve ultimately to inspire more violent activism. Islamism represents a
diffuse set of ideologies and methodologies, and at the beginning of this chapter, I
proposed that it alone is not sufficient to explain the radicalisation of those willing
to justify violence. Not only are the ports of call many, the divergent paths of
Islamic revivalism,even among those who basically see the world the same way,
mean that trying to ascribe culpability of this phenomenon onto any one “ism” is
difficult.
61
Chapter 3: Islamism and making of modern Indonesia
In the preceding chapter, I analysed the origins and evolution of the Islamist
revivalist movements and established both the complex variations that exist within
the Islamist ideological space as well as the intimate relationship these movements
have shared with the unfolding of the nation-state project on a variety of levels.
Rather than vie wing Islamism as either unified or the violence associated with it
as inevitable, I advanced the problem of Islamist violence as one response to the
failure of the secular nation-state to deliver a viable project. Similarly, in
considering the radicalisation process of those willing to commit acts of violence
in the name of Islam in Indonesia, we must also consider the role of Islam in the
origins and development of the Indonesian nation-state and the extent to which
the four waves of Islamist revivalism have served as both a driver for and
bulwark against the project of the Indonesian nationalism. The nation-state, as
both an actor and provider of goods, is among the most influential socialising
agents that we as humans encounter and thus any social science analysis that
seeks to unravel the processes of socialisation that leads individuals and groups
to wards violence would be lacking if it did not consider the idiom of violence and
role that these revivalist movements have played in shaping, or attempting to
shape, public discourse over Islam’s complex role in Indonesian society.
Since the attacks and on September 11 2001 and then in Bali and Jakarta,
there has been much attention paid to a supposedly “ worry trend of Islamisation”
in Indonesia. Not withstanding the obvious level of analysis, and taking in to
account specific events, even a cursory glance of the region’s modern history
(from the time of Dutch occupation) would reveal a continuing and similarly
“ worrying trend of Islamisation.” Beginning with Padri Wars in Sumatra in the early
nineteenth century, continuing through the Dural Islam movement in the Sukarno
years, and then inter-communal violence of the late Suharto era, various forms of
violence justified under the banner of Islam are not unique to the politics of the
62
region. Thus it remains to be seen whether recent acts of religious violence
inspired by, and in defense of Islam present prima facie evidence of the mass
spontaneous mobilisation of radical Islamism in Indonesia. If we employ Ehud
Sprinzak’s Iceberg Model, which argues that fringe elements acting as the tip of
the iceberg can melt away and infect and thus radicalise the rest of the polity, to
justify the conclusion that the radical fringe of the Indonesia Muslim spectrum
poses the ability to conservatise the sensible middle, then perhaps many of the
recent events would take on a new level of urgency (Sprinzak 1995). This
hypothesis while attractive, is difficult to justify and despite the presence of
various radical groups that advocate a broad project to Islamise the Archipelago,
the ability of these forces to coalesce as a mass project has thus far failed.
Insomuch as acts of violence associated with the Islamist agenda have proven to
be perennial features of the Indonesian system, this phenomenon should not be
taken out of context and in many instances, has more to do with a broader pattern
of structural violence hard wired into the geo-politics of the archipelago than it
does the traction of the globalised agenda of Jihadist neofundamentalist Islam. The
evolving idea of the Indonesian nation-state, particularly since the fall of the
Suharto regime, has re-invigorated the space for activism surrounding the
question of Muslim identity and the boundaries of religious expression. Within this
changed environment it cannot be denied that there are groups that harbour
deeply conservative agendas unfriendly to western interests and to the interests
of the secular nation-state itself. Despite that there people and groups that want
to violently shift the goal posts of Indonesian Islam to the right, ho wever, Islamism
(in all its forms) has always been one of many competing “isms” looking to
capture the socio-political imagination of the archipelago. Thus disembodying
recent manifestations of Islamism from the evolution of the nation-state itself
paints an incomplete picture on the nature and trajectory of Islamism’s impact. So
once again we must consider the socialising impact the state has had in the
63
evolution of various types of religious discourse. As Laffan (2003) notes:
It has only been when the state has attempted to intervene in defining or
manipulating Islam, or indeed when it has ignored religion on the path to
uneven development, that it has so wn the seeds of on the disenchanted
fringes of Islamic movements (398).
In an effort to contextualise the role of Islamist religiosity in the evolution of
the nation-state and flesh out Islamism’s diverse impact on the development of
modern Indonesia, this chapter will evaluate several key points. First, we will
discuss the transmission of Salafist and Modernist revival ideologies from the
Middle East to the archipelago, and evaluate the extent to which these ideologies
spurned anti-colonial ideas. Next, we will evaluate Islamist ideology in the late
colonial and early independence period under Sukarno and evaluate the role of
violent secessionist movements like Dural Islam. Finally, we address the
radicalising impact of the Suharto years and how the New Order regime
simultaneously suppressed and courted Islamist elements for its o wn ends and
set in motion a series of dynamics that has resulted in an escalating pattern of
ethno-religious conflict and an upsurge in Jihadist violence. All of these points will
be discussed with the vie w to demonstrate that in the context of Indonesia, we
cannot develop a consistent theoretical typology that addresses socialisation of
the individual Islamic terrorist without first assessing at a systemic level the
checkered role of Islamism in the development of the State.
Part 1: Colonialism, Revivalism and the Arab World
Southeast Asia has long been connected to the centre of the Muslim world
through oceanic trade. Beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
Yemeni traders brought Islam to the Indonesian archipelago and converted rulers
along the straits of Malacca (Laffan 2003: 398). Despite tthat there has been an
on-going process of selection and modification of various practices, combining
them with Islamic and pre-Islamic features (Bubalo & Fealy 64 2005: 48), it is also
64
true that the culture and ideas to emanate from the centre of the Muslim world
have been consistently po werful in shaping the faith in the Malay-Indonesian
w orld. The synergistic connection bet ween the archipelago and Middle East,
ho wever, goes beyond the transfer of ideas. From the mid-nineteenth century, a
permanent settlement of several thousand Yemeni Arab traders from the
Hadramawt Valley settled throughout the Malay w orld and established themselves
as prominent members of ulema (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 50). The descendents of
these settlers, known as Hadramis, would play the role of “cultural broker”
bet ween Arab and Southeast Asian worlds and through familial and cultural
net works, and expand the cross fertilisation of ideas from the Middle East to
Southeast Asia (Elriaz 2004). In addition, with the arrival of Arab migrants into the
archipelago, the flo w also went the other way and from as early as the sixteenth
century, scholars from the Malay-Indonesian world took up residence in Mecca
and formed their o wn communities, known as Jawa (Azra 2004).
While my level of analysis in this work is primarily concerned with the
hard-line manifestation of Islam (ostensibly through the dissemination of revivalist
ideologies), taking an overly securitised vie w Indonesian Islam in general misses
both the complexity and variation that exist within the rubric of Indonesia’s rich
and varied religious tradition. Thus before undertaking a cogent analysis on the
transmission of revivalist ideology, it is necessary to understand the key
categorical division within the archipelago’s Muslim community. During the past
century, the discussion of Indonesian Islam has mainly centred around four
main categories: santri, abagan, traditionalist and modernist. Santri, meaning
religious student, Muslims are those most likely to adhere to ritual and legalist
requirements of Islam (Fealey, Hooker & White 2006: 39). Conversely, Abagan ,
meaning “the red or bro wn ones” refers to Muslims who are generally considered
to be less orthodox in their expression of faith and are more likely to lead
syncretic religious lives in which Islam is blended with other religious or spiritual
65
observances including elements of Buddhist and Hindu practices that were
prevalent before the arrival of Islam (Fealey, Hooker & White 2006: 39). In the
context of this analysis, the terms traditionalist and modernist apply only to Santri
Muslims. Traditionalists usually seek to preserve the authority of medieval Islamic
scholarship and tend to be more tolerant of local customs. Moreover,
traditionalists reject itjhad and focus on traditional modes of jurisprudence or fiqh.
The “local” component of traditionalist Islam in Indonesia includes: the veneration
of saints (wali) and famous Islamic scholars (kiai) as intermediaries bet ween
humans and God; belief in the magical or supernatural power of blessed
individuals, and engagement with cultural or spiritual rituals designed to ensure
communal or individual well being (Fealey, Hooker & White 2006: 39). Modernists,
also referred to here as revivalists, as discussed at length in the previous
chapter, regard the theology and ritual practice of the traditionalists as impure and
a deviation from the original teachings of Islam.
The fractious relationship between traditionalism and modernism remains a
central issue in inter-Muslim dynamic in the development of the Indonesian nationstate. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Modernist school of thought
in the Malay-Indonesian world, as noted above, strongly challenged the domestic
traditional order on both cultural and political levels (Elriaz 2004: 20). The earliest
and most striking example of this clash bet ween the internationalist reform of the
modernist revivalism and traditionalism based in local custom is represented by
the so-called Padri movement, which began in 1803 when a group of Pilgrims
returned to West Sumatra from Mecca and, inspired by the success of the antiSufi Wahhabi efforts in Arabia, tried to assert a scripturalist piety over the
prevailing social order (Laffan 2003: 399). Led by Tuanku Imam Bonjol (1772 1864), also known as Muhammad Syahab, the Padri movement sought to purify
the culture of traditions and beliefs its partisans vie wed as un-Islamic, including
syncretic folk beliefs, cockfighting, gambling, drinking alcohol, and Minangkabau
66
matrilineal traditions (Ricklefs 2007). During this period, the Dutch had yet to
consolidate their possessions in some parts of the archipelago after reacquiring it
from the British. This was especially true of Sumatra, where some areas would
not come under Dutch rule until the 20th century (Dobbin 1983). The factions in
the Padri melee included Minangkabaus, who adopted a nominal form of Salafism
and the Adats, who were Minangkabau traditionalists and wanted to continue to
practice Abangan traditionalism. The Minangkabau traditionalist elites requested
the assistance of Dutch forces to subdue the Padri faction. The Dutch intervention
against the Padris on behalf of the Minangkabau traditionalists set a pattern in
w hich the Dutch began intervening in local conflicts against any nominally inspired
Islamic faction that posed a threat to their rule directly or even to their gro wing
patch work of client-rulers (Laffan 2003: 400). Azra (2004) maintains that the
Padri movement remains a major landmark event in the history of Islamic rene wal
and reform in the archipelago; not only because it questioned the degree to which
ideologies from the centre of the Muslim world should be adopted in the periphery,
but also because it also challenged the established formulation of relations
bet ween the ‘little tradition’ of local Islam that evolved over time in the archipelago
and the ‘great tradition’ of Middle Eastern Islam (147). Despite that the Salafism
inspired by the Wahhabi imagination has never taken hold as a mass movement,
beginning with the Padris in the early 19th century, it has been a an omnipresent
socio-religious force that has inspired different types of activism at different
historical junctures.
The politicisation of the Santri-Abangan divide also made its presence felt
in the ethno-religious dynamic on Java during the mid-19th century. During that
time, the gro wing traction of Middle East inspired religious practice and attempted
Islamisation of the region by those inspired by revivalist ideologies, galvanised
increasingly large segments of the population. According to (Ricklefs 2007), from
1850 on wards there was gro wing and open discord on Java bet ween groups
67
w ho defined themselves by their commitment to Islam: the majority, Abangan, who
w ere nominal Muslims and Putihan, the ones who wear white, or Santri, the more
pious students of Islam influenced by the revivalist thinking of the centre of the
Muslim world (p.6). The Islamisation of Java in this period cannot be addressed
without also discussing the increasing shado w of the Dutch occupation in the
region. Thus, while the Abangan-Santri discord w as real, this chasm occurred
within and was made even more complex by the broader socio-cultural
framework of Dutch colonial consolidation of the East Indies. In effect, Dutch
consolidation of Java masked intra-communal socio-religious discord brought on
by first wave revivalism.
Following their victory in the 1825-1830 Java War, the Dutch were able to
establish a direct colonial structure over the island. The most important
consequence of this was the institution of cultuurstelel (literally “cultural system”
or more specifically “forced cultivation system”) policy (Kingsbury 2005: 31).
Under this system, Javanese peasants were forced to gro w commercial crops
for the government on bet ween one to t wo-fifth of their land. To achieve this end,
colonial policy strove to co-opt the priyayi (the traditional Javanese aristocracy)
into the colonial system and transform them into functionaries of the colonial
machine (Abuza 2003: 60). Thus, rather than subjugate the priyayi directly,
colonial administrators incentivised their cooperation through a profit-sharing
mechanism where the local elites benefited from cultuurstelel policy (Kingsbury
2005: 31). While cultuurstelel was abandoned bet ween 1856-1865 in favour of a
system based on private capital, its effects were enduring on many levels. To this
day, many argue that the disassociation of labour and re ward encouraged under
the cultuurstelel system and the cooptation of elites to enforce it, fundamentally
laid the ground work for the insipid levels of corruption and myriad of governance
issues that plague modern Indonesia.
Beyond the economic failure of cultuurstelel itself, it was the policy of
68
direct colonial rule over Java that is most relevant in my discussion of the complex
role of Islam in evolution of the modern state of Indonesia. In this context, the
pattern in Indonesia seems to fit the patterns discussed in the last chapter. That
is, when intrusive colonial rule is introduced there is a trend to wards the
politicisation of religion as a means of liberation. Thus as Dutch colonialism
became more entrenched in the mid-19th century, the politics of religion became a
focus for both the colonised and coloniser. In this context, Stange (1999) makes
the important point that the strongest root of religious tension in the East Indies lay
in Dutch efforts to prevent Islam from becoming the focus of nationalist sentiment
(130). From a socio-cultural point of vie w, ho wever, it is equally important to
remember that while Islam eventually became a rallying cry around which
nationalism was justified, there was nothing inevitable about the clash bet ween
Dutch colonial occupation and the arrival of revivalist Islam from the Middle East.
There were t wo primary reasons for this, both of which reflect the nature
of Islamism as discussed in the last chapter. First, even among Santri Muslims, the
project to Islamise the region on revivalist precepts was vie wed with suspicion.
Second and more importantly, in many instances the transmission of first wave
revivalist ideology to the region was seen as more of a threat to local cultural
practice than to colonial authority as such. In this sense, the Dutch, like the British,
did not care about the specific contours of the theology as much as they were
more concerned about the political and social challenge to their o wn authority.
Certainly the Dutch were wary of the Ottomon Caliphate’s influence over their
colonial subjects and went to some lengths to monitor the activity of their subjects
in the Arab world. Securing Arab influence, ho w ever, only became an issue
w hen the gaze of revivalism itself shifted to include the cause of political
liberation. In some cases, local revivalist leaders sa w the Dutch as useful agents
in implementing their o wn agenda. For example, the Batavian born Hadrami Sayyid
Uthman (1822-1913) was able, through close connection with Dutch colonial
69
officials, to establish his o wn press through which he railed against the heretical
innovations of local mystical orders (Laffan 2003: 401). Moreover, Uthman also
allied himself with the colonial authorities to stem the gro wing influence of Sharia
oriented Sufi Brotherhoods like Qadiriyya wa Naqshbandiyya, who were in the
crosshairs of both the colonial authorities and Santri – considered political
agitators by one group and scriptural heretics by the other (Laffan 2003: 401).
Thus, as long as the Hadramis like Uthman stayed A-political and kept their critique
centred on the transformation of local Islam, it did not pose a prima facie problem
for the Dutch. Conversely, in the Dutch colonial imagination, all Sufis were by
definition fanatics who were, ‘inspired by Meccan masters to kill them in their
beds' (Laffan 2003: 402). In this context, Sufi inspired Javanese mysticism was
seen as more of the threat than first wave revivalist ideology.
From the analysis presented above perhaps the preliminary conclusion can
be dra wn that the unfolding of Islamism in the Indonesian Archipelago, like its
development in the Arab World, has occurred on t wo axes and has served both
as a mechanism for political liberation and of ecclesiastic revival. First, as the
case of the Padris demonstrates, the adoption of revivalist ideology was at first
an internal project designed to cleanse local Islam of its innovation and ostensibly
make the faithful more faithful. To some extent, the tension bet ween the axes has
never really gone a way. If one examines the current trajectory of Jemmah
Islamiyyah, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that this trend has never really
gone a way and radical Islamists are to this day still more concerned with imposing
their brand of Islam over the people rather than engaging in political processes to
Islamise the nation-state by ballot or by force. Moreover, the latter part of the
nineteenth century sa w the dissemination of revivalist ideology occur in the
distinctly political context of European colonialism. As Elriaz notes:
In the face of the threatening clash bet ween tradition and modernity, and the
collective early t wentieth century mood of weakness in the entire Islamic
w orld, many in the community of the Malay-Indonesian were receptive to
70
the conceptual heritage that emerged in Egypt (p23).
Thus the second axis of the revivalist project occurred in the East Indies
as it had in the Middle East, a response to break the yoke European colonisation.
Here, as the Dutch solidified their control over the region, the Modernist ideas that
w ere taking root among the Arab intelligentsia became increasingly attractive as a
competing political ideology that could be applied as a unifying force to achieve a
form of statehood. Beyond the sole guidance of the Koran (as the Wahhabis
imagined), second wave Modernists had specific ideas about ho w organise a
modern nation-state on Muslim precepts. Borro w ing Benedict Anderson's analogy
of modern Indonesia as an imagined community, then it can be argued that in the
Indonesian context the Islamist machination of its project as a liberation ideology
effectively sought to replace one type of imagined community with another. Thus
the post-colonial manifestation of the modern Indonesian nation-state and the
Islamic state envisaged by modernist thinkers are in this sense both constructed
fictions stemming from imported ideologies (Anderson1991).
On a structural basis, the transmission of second wave revivalism or
Modernist ideology into the Dutch East Indies occurred in much the same way as
first wave revivalism - through a mix of pre-existing social net works and an
opening created by expanding transportations routes. Beginning in the 1860s,
increased shipping frequency bet ween Southeast Asia and the Middle East
allowed more people to undertake the Hajj and study in Middle East – both in
Mecca and at Egypt's al-Azra University. These buoyed cross-cultural
connections led to an increasingly self-confident Muslim community keenly a ware
of and interested in the a wakening inspired by the Mohammed Abduh Pan-Islamist
project. These deepening connections, combined with a burgeoning Islamic
publishing industry, led to what has been described as the Hadrami awakening
across the Malay world where the ideas of Abduh and other Pan-Islamist thinkers
71
w ere translated into local languages for people w ho did not speak Arabic, and
then disseminated throughout the region (Elriaz 2004: 44). It is not surprising that
this worried British and Dutch colonial administrators who, by the end of the 19th
century were becoming increasingly concerned about the organising capacity of
Abduh's Pan-Islamism. To stem the seeds of Islamist thought, the British and Dutch
began to monitor the activities of Muslim colonial subjects and residents in Mecca
and Cairo.
In the Dutch East Indies, the beginning of the 20th century sa w the
emergence of Islamism not only as bulwark against European occupation as
represented by a collection of ideas, but also as organised social movements
acting of behalf of a constituency. Two Javanese inspired Hajjis in particular
sought to transform the socialising capacity of Islam through the creation of
institutions. First, in 1912, K.H. Ahmad Dahlan (1868-1923) founded
the Salafiyyah inspired Muhammahiya organisation in Yogyakarta. Dahlan
returned from Mecca in 1888 and was both inspired by the international
community of believers he encountered there and the extent to which Islamist
ideas were effecting the anti-colonial movement of the Indian sub-continent
(Bo wen 2003: 160). Despite his interest in Islam as a force of transnational
political mobility, he was an Islamic Modernist and as such was primarily
concerned about the scriptural plurality of Javanese Islam and like the Padri
movement, sa w it as his calling to excise Javanese Islam of its syncretism. As
Vickers (2005) notes: “Muhammahiyah’s sense of its o wn modernity marked a
departure in Javanese thinking, a rejection of tradition (57). Here, Vickers raises a
crucial point that reflects much of my analysis in the previous chapter. That is, the
case of Muhammahiy highlights the problematic nature of post September 11
scholarship on Islamist movements. In an effort to “explain” acts of violence
justified on Islamist precepts, there has been an unfortunate propensity to cast
Islamist movements in general as a harbingers of antiquity. As the early case of
72
Muhammadiyah sho ws, ho wever, the cultural veneer of antiquity cannot be
confused with the rejection of modernity. Through the establishment of
Muhammadiyah, Dahlan, emulating the example of Abduh, sought to spread an
authentic Islamic modernity through the word of the Prophet to a population he
considered to be living in antiquity. With membership base of 28-39 million,
Muhammadiyah is the largest modernist organisation in the world and is
comprised of an intricate net work of youth and w omen's organisations,
teachers, academies and universities (madrasah), medical clinics and hospitals,
orphanages and other social welfare organisations (Porter 2005: 40). In addition
to Muhammadiyah, several other modernist organisations during this period
included Sarekat Islam (Unitiing Islam - SI) founded in 1912, and Persatuan Islam
(Unity of Islam - Persis) founded in 1923. The Modernist organisations discussed
above, like their mirror image in the Arab world, catered to the ideological needs of
educated urban elites and gave priority to education, social welfare programs and
dawah (Porter 2005: 40). The urban po wer base of the modernist groups is
important to consider in light of the massive urbanisation project of the first three
decades of the t wentieth century where the complete economic collapse of the
Dutch colonial administration drove increasingly large numbers of people into
urban areas.
To counter the gro wing influence of the Modernist based Muhammadiyah
movement and to protect the economic and socio-religious interests of the rural
based pesantren (religious boarding schools), another prominent Hajji, Hasyim
Asyari, founded the Sufi inspired Nuhdlatul Ullama (NU) (Revival of the Religious
Scholars) (Porter 2005: 40). In the last 70 years, NU has become a diverse and
complex organisation with a membership base exceeding 30 million members. Part
of its longevity and success may be due in some part to a decentralised structure
based on the hereditary influence of individual teachers who run a system of
traditional Islamic boarding schools in central Java (Porter 2005: 41). Unlike
73
Muhammadiyah, an organisation designed with the express purpose of
advocating a ne w agenda based on an external set of ideologies, NU represented
a formalisation of the collective influence that each individual pesentren enjoyed.
Here it is important to note that despite NU's political influence, it became a political
organisation not because it maintained a real political agenda per se, but by virtue
that is was in competition with Muhammadiya. Moreover, NU had to be seen to be
standing up against the Dutch colonial authorities who were increasing their grip
on the control of the religious groups in the archipelago. Both organisations were
concerned about the gro wing reach of the Colonial administration, including, most
significantly, the 1925 Guru Ordinance, which restricted the provision of religious
education by requiring all classes to be registered with Dutch appointed officials
and further regulations mandating that mosques be under the guidance of the
bupati, the highest grade of native civil servant in the colony (Fealy, Hooker &
White 2006: 43).
Part 2: Islam and founding of the nation-state
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, opposition to w hat was seen as
unacceptable levels of Dutch interference in Muslim life continued unabated and
an increasing number of Islamic modernist organisations beat the drum of
nationalism. The Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation of the Dutch East
Indies from 1942-45 would represent yet another transformative juncture for the
Islamist cause in the region. During the occupation, the Japanese attempted to
legitimate their role as liberators and partners in the cause of Indonesian
nationalism. They justified their legitimacy as liberators on distinctly ethno-cultural
grounds and advanced the position that they were liberating their Asian brethren
from the clutches of an oppressive foreign (European) colonial structure. Of
course this vie w among locals was short lived as tens of thousands were
starved to death and were coerced into forced labour.
74
The Japanese occupation fundamentally solidified the place of Islam under
the big tent of competing ideals for the cause of Indonesian nationalism and went
to extraordinary lengths to harness the nascent anger of many constituencies
to wards their European colonial overlords. Most significantly, the Japanese
radicalised and politicised the Islamist voice; Ulema were given military and political
training and all Muslim organisations, including Muhammadiya and NU, were
merged under the Japanese-created umbrella organization Masyumi (Majelis
Syura Muslimin Indonesia) (Van Bruinessen 2002, Heffner 2000: 41). In the
revolutionary period Masyumi would act as both the advancing the interest of the
archipelago's Muslim community, while remaining a centralised organisation under
Japanese control. The influence of the Japanese spread beyond their use of
Islamist organisation; their three- year rule eschew ed a number of governance
innovations including local neighborhood organisations, and most significantly,
they buoyed nationalist leaders like the young charismatic Sukarno and his PNI
party (Hefner 2000: 41). As Vickers (2005) maintains, the combination of
nationalism and destruction spurned by Japanese occupation were essential
ingredients for the nationalist revolution that follow ed World War Two (85).
Within days of the Japanese surrender on 8 August 1945, Sukarno and
Hatta declared independence and bet ween 1945 and 1949 a full-scale revolution
to unseat the Dutch ensued. The Revolution was of course about more than just
removing the Dutch from the region; it was also a revolution of ideas surrounding
the guiding principles that would underlie the of the ne w Indonesian nation-state.
In this dynamic, deciding on the exact role of Islam in the Indonesia nation-state
w as a pernicious balancing act. This was not only because the ulema (both
traditionalist and modernist) had declared Jihad and played an important role in the
struggle for independence and as a consequence had a legitimate voice, but also
because there seemed to be an equal number of voices that wanted a version of
a secular state. In this context, Sukarno was faced with the unenviable task of
75
both balancing the demands of the ulema while also selling the idea of cohesive
nation-state to a culturally, religiously, linguistically and ethnically diverse
collection of islands. Thus it seemed that in setting the ideological goal posts for
the state, Sukarno was uncomfortable with using the dominant political imagery of
the day – be it capitalism, Islamic modernism or Marxism. Instead Sukarno, like
Ataturk, seemed to be more interested in advancing the idea of a secular republic
centred somewhat on his personality. The foundation of Sukarno's nationalism
w as set forth in the doctrine of the Five State Principles, or Pancasila, first made
public in the middle of 1945 (Vickers 2006: 117). These principles were: (1)
Structuring a Free Indonesia in Faithfulness to God Almighty, (2) Consensus or
Democracy, (3) Internationalism or humanitarianism, (4) social prosperity and (5)
nationalism or national unity (Vickers 2005: 117). While the principles of Pancasila
w ere not enshrined in the interim constitution of 1950, political elites established a
broad consensus situated generally around its key precepts. Leading up the first
national election to be held in 1955, it was agreed that the interim state would be
unitary republic rather than a federal republic, and it was also agreed that political
parties would be the vein through which the various demographic cleavages
w ould be expressed (Bertrand 2004: 34).
Muslim groups in general, but particularly those influenced by second and
third wave revivalist ideology, believed that Sukarno's nationalism was a shallow
basis on which to build a nation and that his Five Principles were a western
anachronism (Heffner 2000: 39). In an effort to ameliorate the tensions bet ween
those who wanted an Islamic theocratic state and those who advocated western
nationalism, Muslim leaders demanded the inclusion of a constitutional caveat
w ould have required all Muslims in Indonesia be subject to Shari law –
other wise known as the Jakarta Charter.
Despite that the Jakarta Charter was abandoned for a lack of support, the
questions over the role of Islam in society did not disappear and the most
76
significant challenge to the state in the early years came from segments of the
Muslim community. In January 1948, Muslim militias in West Java broke away from
the Republican government after the latter had made what the former perceived to
be an unfair agreement with the Dutch (the Renville Agreement) and ordered its
militias to withdra w to Central Java (van Bruinessen 2005). Coordinated by the
radical Muslim politician, Kartosu wiryo, the breaka way militias continued to fight
the Dutch and gradually established their o wn rudimentary form of government
and state apparatus that recognised no law except Shari (van Bruinessen 2005).
The Dural Islam movement (DI), or the Islamic State of Indonesia as it came to call
itself, remained a serious competitor to the Republican movement throughout the
final years of the revolution and became a major problem for it after full
independence had been won (van Bruinessen 2005). At its height, DI had of
thousands of fighters and controlled significant tracks of mountainous jungle and
hinterland across West Java, Aceh and South Sulawesi (Fealy, Hooker & White
2006: 49). The rebellion killed between 15,000 and 40,000 and displaced up to half
a million (Fealy, Hooker & White 2006: 49). The Darul Islam movement remained a
viable alternative to the secular Republic until the main cog of its leadership base
w as routed in 1962 (van Bruinessen 2005).
By the mid 1950s, the po wer of Sukarno's personality and the interim rules
established years earlier were not enough to ameliorate the tensions surrounding
the issue of the basic foundation of the state and the widely differing vie ws on
the parameters of Indonesian nationalism. Haemorrhages emerged on several
fronts. While the NU was generally able to integrate its agenda into the framework
of the Sukaro regime, the relations bet ween it and its modernist counterpart,
together with the relationship bet ween modernist organisations and state, began
to fail. In 1952 NU broke away from Masyumi because of a conflict over the
distribution of government positions for its members. NU members were for the
most part products of the pesentren system and lacked the western education to
77
w hich many of the modernist Masyumi members had been exposed (van
Bruinessen 2005). By the late 1950s, Masyumi became increasingly disaffected
with Sukarno's style of leadership and was particularly critical of the regime's
cooperation with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The antipathy was mutual
and regime elites suspected Mayumi of secret collusion with the still simmering the
Dural Islam movement. In particular, political elites were weary of Masyumi's
po wer base outside of Java, particularly in Aceh, Sumatra and Sulawesi
(Bertrand 2004: 35).
The results of Indonesia's first national election in 1955 were telling of the
deep division within Indonesian society, particularly in relation to the role of Islam
in the day-today affairs of the state. Rather than delivering any one political
faction a clear mandate, the results only exacerbated the existing factional
tensions (Bertrand 2004: 35). In the ballot, the Islamist parties NU and Masyumi
commanded 21 and 18.5 percent of the vote respectively, Sukarno's nationalist
PNI commanded 22.5 percent, and the Communist PKI party commanded 16.5
percent (van Bruinessen 2005). Thus the electorate was almost equally
divided on the secular and religious based parties. This result effectively
ans wered the question of the Jakarta Charter and issue was resolved in the
negative.
In understanding the trajectory of the Islamist agenda in Indonesia today,
the political turmoil of the 1950s remains a fundamentally important juncture to
consider and highlights a series of dynamics that have changed little over the past
50 years. What evolved in the 1950s within Masyumi was a fundamental
disagreement between the Islamist faction over a number of key issues, including:
(a) ho w to convert the message of Islam into a political agenda, (b) the limits of
that agenda and (c) the common set of means by which to do this. That these
factions agreed on the inclusion of the Jakarta Charter was not enough to unite
the divergent interests of the groups. While there were obvious ideological fault
78
lines bet ween the NU and Muhammadiyah, less obvious and in many cases more
severe were the gro wing divisions within the modernist camp itself. Voices within
the modernist camp ranged from those calling for full engagement in parliamentary
processes, to those calling for a retreat from politics and focus on dawa activities,
to those who called for the violent rejection of the state altogether. To a large
degree, the split among modernists in this period generally reflected the
factional split between the second and third wave revivalists discussed in the last
chapter, and were driven by many of the same dynamics. Thus, for Islam to
shape the politics of Indonesia it would need to act as a cohesive unit. The
political dynamics of the 1950s highlight its inability to act as a truly unifying
source of political liberation. In addition to intra-communal Muslim disagreements
and souring relations bet ween Masyumi and the state, problems were also
bre wing around the archipelago on an ethnic level. At issue was the increasingly
centralised nature of the Indonesian nation-state. In the interim constitutional
discussions, the regions had accepted a unitary state in exchange for guarantees
of regional autonomy (Bertrand 2004: 35). In this context, Muslims were one of
many constituencies that perceived that central government had reneged on its
commitment. The crisis came to a head in February of 1958 when a coalition of
politicians from Jakarta and regional leaders proclaimed an alternative
government, the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia (PRRI)
(Bertrand 2004: 36).
Sukarno maintained a two-front attack on the gro wing number of ethnic
rebellions simmering around the archipelago. As a first step he began to dispatch
military with greater frequency into the regions. Then, on the political front, he
looked to solidify his o wn control through the implementation of ne w political
regime. Dubbed “Guided Democracy”, his ne w political regime was announced in
1957 as an alternative to western style democracy. It gave more po wer to the
President and military and ensued that only active or retired military personnel with
79
unquestioned loyalty to the centre would be appointed as officials at a regional or
district level (Porter 2005). The plan also nationalised all industry and in particular
removed remaining Dutch interests from the economy (Robison & Hadiz 2005: 44).
In 1960, following Masyumi's refusal to cooperate with the ne w system, the party
w as banned. Sukarno then dissolved parliament and forced remaining Muslim
political parties to integrate into the ne w secular political order.
To ameliorate his gro wing dependence on the military to the keep the state
as a cohesive unit, Sukarno offered support for the PKI. Under his tacit patronage
the PKI's support base gre w markedly and with the promised land reform and
better income distribution, they offered an agenda attractive to many struggling
Indonesians (Friend 2003: 101). The final confrontation between the PKI and the
military (TNI) ended with the assassination of six generals on 30 September 1965.
The military labeled the event as a coup attempt on the part of the PKI, and military
units under the control of Suharto responded to the attack. Within days, Suharto
(then commander of KOSTRAD the strategic Army Reserve) had seized control of
the armed forces and had given himself wide pow ers to restore order and
security. The PKI was banned and its members w ere jailed, killed or exiled. In the
follo wing months, violence extended beyond attacks against PKI operatives and
hundreds of thousands of people were killed. While many were Communists,
many others were killed in settling local conflicts.
Part 3: Islamism in The New Order
By March 1966, effective Presidential powers had been transferred to
Suharto, who acceded to the Presidency the follo wing year. As his first order of
business, Suharto aggressively purged the political system of “Old Order”
influence, and systematically eliminated any left-wing supporters in the armed
forces and placed people loyal to him in positions of authority. He bolstered the
role of the military in civilian tasks and to some extent formalised elements of
80
previous government policy. Suharto maintained a vision of depoliticised Indonesia
governed under strong centralised authority and was above all else, paranoid
about the threats to the regime from forces within. Along these lines, Robison and
Hadiz (2004) succinctly unpack the core elements of the New Order regime and
argue that the regime evolved into:
A regulatory apparatus imposing a framework of fiscal and monetary discipline
and highly organised political repression aimed at preventing the economic and
social disorder that had corroded the previous regime. Within this was
established: A system of organising state and society relations characterised
primarily by the disorganisation of civil society and the dominance of state-created
corporatist institutions.
An extensive and complex system of patronage personified by Suharto that
penetrated all layers of society from Jakarta dow n to the provinces, to wns and
villages. During its heyday it became a capitalist oligarchy that fused public
authority and private interest, epitomised by the rise of such families as the
Suhartos.(p.43)
From the analysis presented above, it becomes clear that we need to be
nuanced in evaluating the processes by which Islamism was incorporated into the
corporatised po wer structure of New Order political regime. While it is often
argued that the Suharto regime was a natural enemy of the Islamist voice, the
reality is far more complex. In effect, Suharto had no natural allies or enemies and
through its tenure, the New Order regime both empowered and disempowered
various groups at different times to fit its o wn agenda. Rather than suppressing
Muslim activism and secularising politics, Suharto instituted a number of reforms
that combined severe control of political Islam while allowing expressions of
Islamic spirituality (Heffner 2000: 58). Regime elites looked to organize religion as
an anchor for public morality, a shield against w estern liberalism and an anecdote
for communism (Heffner 2000: 59). In this context, the New Order not only
tolerated depoliticised forms of religion but also encouraged its penetration into all
corners of society (Heffner 2000: 59).
For the first five years of its existence, the New Order regime found it
convenient to build a temporary alliance with Muslim groups, ostensibly to finish
81
the task of purging the Indonesian nation-state of its undesirable elements –
particularly the PKI elements that survived the initial purges. Bet ween 1965 and
1967, the ethnic Chinese community caught the ire of the regime and was
accused of being Communist, while others were resented for their control of
commercial interests. Here it is widely believed that Suharto's po werful
intelligence chief, Ali Mutopo (often credited as the real architect of the New
Order), cultivated a group of DI veterans and allow ed them to maintain an arms
cache to be used against Communists and other enemies of the regime (van
Bruinessen 2005).
Despite the early flirtation, the New Order's policy, beginning in the early
1970s and continuing through the middle of the 1980s, shifted to wards one of
managing and containing the Muslim forces. While Suharto released the Masyumi
leadership structure from prison, he did not allow their core leadership to regroup
in the political arena (Hefner 1997: 78). To give voice to Masyumi and the
constituency, and to curtail the influence of NU, Suharto established Parmusi to
cater to the needs of Masyumi's political constituency. Without the backing of
Masyumi's leaders, ho wever, it was unable to recapture its former clout. The old
Masyumi elite effectively split up into two distinct groups.
Following its de-registry, many Masyumi leaders, including Mohammad
Nastir, decided to devote their energies to dakwah (da'wa) rather than engage in
traditional political processes. Nastir's retreat from electoral politics into street
level activism was broadly symptomatic of a general trend occurring in other
Muslim nations - generally reflected in the demographic shift from modernism to
neo-revivalism. Embittered by the corrupt and exclusionary politics of both the
New and Old Orders, Nastir and many other modernists believed that the
Islamisation of Indonesia would need to take place n a grass-roots level (Heffner
1997: 78). The Dakwah Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia – or DDII)
w as established in 1967 and served the dual function of both Islamising the
82
population while also serving as a voice of dissent against the regime. As an
organisation, DDII presented an unlikely juxtaposition of vie ws: a belief in the
superiority of western style democracy over the forms of governance instituted
by Sukarno and Suharto, an obsession with Christian missionaries efforts as a
threat to Islam, and an increasingly strong orientation towards the Middle East,
particularly Saudi Arabia (van Bruinessen 2005). Following the Saudi oil boom and
increased activism of its Salafi ulema DDII established a connection with the Saudi
funded Islamic World Youth League. Saudi largesse had t wo major
consequences. First, patronage from charities associated with Saudi Arabian
Government gave groups like DDII a degree of legitimacy and political cover to
carry out their activities. Second, while the transfer of people and ideas bet ween
the archipelago and the Middle East was not new the increasingly politicized and
violent machinations that lay on the fringes of Fourth Wave revivalism added a
complex layer to Indonesia’s simmering ethno-religious mix.
While DDII was working to Islamise the population, another group of former
Masyumi functionaries rescinded their critique of Suharto and joined the
machinery of the regime's Golkar Party. The 1966 Generation, as they were
called, formed the basis of the Muslim technocrat a wakening in the early 1990s.
To present a counter-balance to the NU on the one hand and subversive dakwah
organisations, the regime encouraged its young modernist faction to pursue
higher education in west – particularly in the USA and Canada.
To ensure the continuation of Abangan-Christian domination of the State,
the 1970s sa w the regime employ increasingly draconian measures to maintain
the marginalisation of the Muslim voice in the political system. To achieve this,
Suharto resorted to a mix of strategies aimed at w eakening Islam's capacity for
independent political activity and to garner victory for Golkar at elections (Porter
2005: 46). Among these strategies were state interventions in the parties,
electoral manipulations, and a general politic of intimidation and coercion. In 1973,
83
all Muslim parties (Parmusi, NU, Perti and PSII) were forcefully merged into the
United Development Party (PPP). This policy was followed by the implementation
of the Floating Mass Strategy, which ensured that political parties like PPP could
not organize politically below the district level (Porter 2002: 46). In 1977, when it
looked like Golkar would not get 50 percent of the national vote, Suharto
dispatched his intelligence chief to create a diversion. Beginning in 1977 and
continuing through the early 1980s, there were repeated acts of terrorism
including arson and the bombing of Churches, nightclubs and cinemas, all claimed
by the shado wy Komando Jihad (Bertrand 2004: 82). These attacks had the
convenient effect of dissuading people from voting for the PPP. The Komando
Jihad leaders arrested for the attacks were veterans of DI, again proving the
connection bet ween New Order's intelligence service and the DI elements (van
Bruinessen 2005).
While the regime was not afraid to use Jihadist elements for its o wn ends,
throughout the 1980s, Suharto and his cronies continued to view Islam as the
biggest threat to the internal stability of the state. This vie w was reflected in t wo
key events. First, his appointment of Benny Murdani.(a Javanese Christian) as TNI
chief; this choice effectively shored up the continued Javanese-AbanganChristian domination of the state. Second, his imposition of Pancasila on all parties
and associations was an attempt to formally extend the Abangan-Christian
ideological domination across the archipelago. The backlash that followed resulted
in the a series of violent riots – including the famous incident at Tanjung Proik in
Jakarta and the bombing of a bank branch o wned by one of Suharto's Chinese
business partners (van Bruinessen 2005).
By the late 1980s, the ground beneath Suharto's leadership was shifting
and his leadership faced several serious problems. First and most significantly,
his relationship with the TNI was under question. Benny Murdani, the Army chief
and former Suharto protégé, was actively criticising the affairs of the First Family.
84
The second element was structural; while the regime had used the AbangnChristian po wer base to limit the po wer of the nascent Santri voice, Suharto sa w
that to maintain his o wn leadership and control the shifting loyalties of the TNI, he
had to shift his ethno-religious alignments (Bertrand 2004: 83, Heffner 1997). To
this end, he turned to wards the institutions of Islam to find ne w legitimacy particularly the former Masyumi leadership. The greening of Golkar, as it was
labeled at the time, represented a broad set of official and unofficial policies to
make the government more inclusive of Muslim interests (Friend 2003: 120). Under
the leadership of his closest advisor and anointed successor, B.J. Habibie,
Suharo allowed the establishment of an association of Muslim intellectuals (ICMI)
and endorsed its demands for affirmative action. In the context of early 1990s
Indonesia, this meant proportionate representation of Muslims (usually of a
scripturalist ilk) in leadership positions as well as the institutions that represented
the interests of the Muslims (Friend 2003: 120). During this period, an Islamic bank
and daily ne wspaper was set up and legislation w as enacted that elevated the
position of Islamic courts. Thus the trend to wards a greater role for Muslims in
government through the creation of the ICMI and the simultaneous marginalisation
of the Christian Community, signaled to many the beginning of ne w po wer
dynamic (Bertrand 2004: 90).
Rather than representing something completely ne w, the Islamisation of the
New Order probably represented a formalisation of Suharto's existing policy on
depoliticized ethno-religious affiliation. Nevertheless, it did without question
increase ethno-religious tensions across the archipelago. Towards the mid to late
1990s, this issue became highlighted in the eastern section of the archipelago
w here, from the mid 1970s on wards, the regime maintained a transmigration
policy that relocated people from densely populated to sparsely populated areas
(Heffner 2000). The policy had the effect of moving Muslims from the western
part of the archipelago into the Christian majority eastern section. In the context of
85
the government's rapprochement with various Muslim organisations, this policy
provided a windo w of opportunity for those on both sides of the Muslim-Christian
divide with a vested interest in se wing the seeds of ethno-religious confrontation
(Elson 2001). In the post New Order era, this dynamic was typified most starkly
by the low intensity civil conflicts in Aceh and Sulawesi.
In many respects, the Islamist epoch of the late New Order presented a
boon for groups looking to advance a conservative Islamist agenda. In the face of
a failing economy and ethno-political issues, the regime successfully co-opted the
forces of conservative Islam into its vast web of patronage. In particular, the
regime supported the conservative Dakwah activities of the DDII – with the help of
Saudi and Middle Eastern funding streams, the group expanded markedly its
members base. This style of activism in turn gave rise to a form street Islam that
espoused the radicalised politics of resentment seen else where in the Muslim
w orld and embodied by support for global Islamist causes and gro wing levels of
anti-Semitism. The politics of “street Islam” were particularly useful to the regime in
managing the influence of leftist and women' groups. This period also yielded the
re-emergence of the DI offshoot MMI – the precursor to JI. Conversely, the trend
among conservative Muslims towards either classical Salalism or the politicised
polemic of Qutbism, was far from uniform and there were equal numbers of selfconfessed Islamists eager to find different types of ideological expression.
There can be no doubt that the last decade of the New Order had a
conservatising impact on at least the short-term direction of Indonesian Islam. The
Suharto regime's willingness to use the “Muslim space” to stir ethno-religious fires
for its political ends was disastrous and created an escalating climate of macro
societal radicalisation where acts of intimidation, terror and religious violence
w ould become more frequent. As the current problem with JI demonstrates, the
arm of militant Islam can be successfully harnessed by the state for its o wn ends
but it is a dangerous game and ultimately the state risks losing control of the
86
experiment at which point groups like JI start to operate outside the agreed upon
boundaries.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have presented a detailed political history on the role of
Islam and Islamist movements in the evolution of the Indonesian nation-state from
the mid-19th century until the end of the New Order period. I have engaged
several fields and levels of analysis including: the transmission of ideas from the
centre of the Muslim world to the archipelago, the impact of Islamic thought on the
evolution of the state, and ho w forces of the state have managed the tides of
Islam. As my analysis has demonstrated, questions over the role of Islam in the
geo-political framework of the region are vast and complex and go to the heart of
the many issues that began long before the attacks on September 11 2001. Thus,
beginning to consider more specifically the radicalisation process of those who
have committed acts of violence in the name of Islam recently, behooves an
appropriate contextualisation of the analysis.
Throughout this chapter, several broad patterns in the analysis have
emerged. On the theme of the Islamist agenda, the trends present in Indonesia
starting in the colonial times to the fall of the Suharto regime seem to reflect the
much of the analysis developed in the last chapter. First, like their counter-parts in
Egypt we see a general inability on the part of Indonesian Islamists to craft a
coherent governing agenda palatable to the electorate. The traditionalist-modernist
divide, the Abangan-Santri divide, and more specific fissures within those camps,
have been a source of an enduring state of paralysis in the project to craft a
common agenda to unseat the dominant western models of secularism. Despite
the interest in the various waves of Islamist revivalism (particularly modernism),
there seems to be a deep reticence to the some of the austere manifestations of
this phenomenon. Second, there has been a consistent pattern on the part of
87
successive governing structures in the region to corporatise the forces of Islam –
most of the time with disastrous consequences. As the Suharto years clearly
demonstrate, the practice of politicising and de-politicising the forces of faith in
society is a recipe for ongoing inter-communal strife. Above all else, this chapter
has demonstrated ho w the macro political conditions can create those in which
acts of religious violence and terrorism get hardwired into conduct of intercommunal relations.
88
Chapter 4: Politics of the "Pre man State" – Islamism in Post Suharto
Indonesia
The immediate period following the collapse of the New Order regime in
1998 presented both as a continuation and deviation from the previous 30 years
of policy planning. Suharto’s inability to manage the economic collapse of
Indonesia combined with loss of legitimacy so w ed the seeds of his do wnfall
(Robison & Hadiz 2005). Certainly on the face of it, the fall of the Suharto
government in Indonesia was looking at a sort of democratic opening. While the
Reformasi movement succeeded in its demands that Suharto leave po wer, his
legacy lived on and the New Order system of patronage and cronyism reigned
supreme in its quest to stall the nation’s nascent democratisation agenda. As
discussed at length in the last chapter, the central features of the Old and New
Orders were their total obsession with managing and dominating the institutions of
religious and civil society. Thus, if the New Order regime quintessentially
functioned as a protection racket with Suharto as the ultimate Godfather, then his
absence created a dynamic in which a number of groups would begin to clamour
for the top spot in the ne w po wer pyramid. As McLeod (2000) so aptly described
it, ‘Suharto’s departure left the corrupt political and business franchise he
developed without a lynchpin, its godfather (Mcleod 2000 in Linnday 2001: 283).’
Above all else, the shift seen in the transition out of New Order politics was not a
latitudinal shift to ward a ‘new politics’ but rather the evolution of a ne w type of
po wer relationship among a variety of actors w ho were looking to re-position
themselves in the Godfather role. This effectively sa w the centralized and
orchestrated violence of the New Order evolve to wards a trend of decentralised
mass spontaneous violence (O’Rourke 2002, Lindsey 2001). In this dynamic, an
already fragile set of simmering ethno-religious and inter-communal complexities
w ere manipulated to serve the interests of peoples looking to advance conflicting
political agendas.
89
For Islam and the institution of Islam the post New Order era would give
rise to a number of big questions and brought the debate over the position of Islam
within Indonesian society back to the big table of national politics. The Jakarta
Charter was abandoned because it was unpopular and unsustainable as a
governing agenda. In the eyes of Islamists (of all stripes), ho wever, the forced
secularisation and de-politicisation of religious life under both the Old and New
Orders legitimated, in the context of a changed and democratising political culture,
the need for a ne w discourse on the role of Islam in the day-to-day workings of
the nation-state. Of course, this ne w debate on the role of Islam in the state
occurred within the framework of an increasingly conservatised religious culture
encouraged in the last decade of the New Order regime. In this context, it may be
fair to conclude that during this period increasingly large numbers of Indonesia’s
Muslims were ‘radicalising’ – that is, there was a proliferation of a wide set of
agendas that could broadly described as anti-pluralist and austere theologically.
While it is possible to argue this case it would be problematic to conclude that
Indonesia’s 180 million Muslims were radicalising on the same trajectory. As I
discussed in the first chapter, the vast rubric of Islamism can lead to
fundamentally different sorts of expressions of piety, ranging from the violent
rejection of the secular nation-state and the taking of innocent lives, to an interest
in Islamisation through the electoral process, to a complete withdra wal from
secular society into isolated scripturalism. As I have argued throughout this work,
there is no agreement in Indonesia or else where among Islamists on ho w best to
achieve their goal or even what the goal should be.
To understand accurately the escalating cadence of Islamist violence that
emerged in the post New Order period, this chapter will problematise the link
bet ween conservative theology and violent expressions of religiosity, and further
contextualise the rise of the Islamist religiosity against a series of other dynamics.
More specifically, this chapter will address: the changing po wer dynamics in post
90
Suharto Indonesia and role of the “Islamist space” in that process, the shifting
terrain of the Islamist agenda beginning in the 1990s, and the main groups that
have emerged over the past 15 years. Finally I will examine the changing modes
of piety and activism and begin to delve into the condition that led to the shift from
violent Islamist religiosity at an inter-communal level to attacks on foreign targets.
Part 1: Political Islam and re-ordering of Power in Post New Order Indonesia
The beginnings of the end of the New Order regime were visible well
before the 1998 financial crisis but it was without question the complete collapse
of the Indonesian economy, brought on by the crisis that dealt the body blow to
Suharto’s leadership. While Suharto had become a master of quietly quashing
dissent by effectively pulling the strings of intercommunal politics to his
advantage, in the wake of the magnitude of the crisis he was unable to contain or
control the rising voices of discord. At the same time, he lost the confidence of
the key governing institutions – including the TNI and a large s wath of his o wn
cabinet. On 21 May 1998, amid mass protests and civil chaos, B.J. Habibie
replaced Suharto as the President of Indonesia.
The final months of the Suharto rule and the transition period following his
ousting set the scene for another tectonic shift within the house of political Islam.
The continued leadership of the Golkar party and the leadership B.J. Habibie was
fraught on a number of fronts from the outset. First, the secular wing of the
Reformasi movement considered Habibie too close to the New Order regime and
w anted to see ‘total reform. Second, despite that Habibie installed a cabinet in
w hich ICMI personalities and the Muslim “green” faction of the TNI were well
represented, support for the Habibie government was far universal from within
the Muslim political spectrum and a broad array of secular and non-secular
Muslims were concerned that Habibie’s presidency would further empower antipluralist conservative Santri Muslim. As a result, many elites decided instead to
91
back the charismatic NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid or secular nationalist
Megawati Sukaroputri over Habibie (van Bruinessen 2005, Sidel 2006).
Without question, though, the biggest anti-Golkar force came from the
ranks of the student population. Muslim student activism, which had gro wn
consistently through the 1980s and 1990s and w as represented by a number of
organisations including the Neo-Revivalist (third w ave) Kesatuan Aksi Mahasis wa
Muslim Indonesia or Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union (KAMMI), was vocal
in its opposition to the Habibie government (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 69). On the other
end of the ideological spectrum, leftist student groups demanded the complete
overthro w of the New Order and all of Suharto’s collaborators (van Bruinessen
2005). Habibie’s tenure in the Presidency was marred by several contradictory
trends. On the one hand he tried to distance himself from Suharto politics and
instituted a number of key reforms including lifting the legislation that discriminated
against Chinese, he took power a way from the military, decentralized
government, and set East Timor on a rocky road to independence (Vickers 2005:
210). On the other hand, Habibie used New Order style tactics to attempt to s way
the outcome of the 1999 elections. He used ICMI’s patronage net works over
groups like DII and KISDI to mobilize the forces of street Islam against competing
parties – particularly those from the left. In the same way that Suharto created
and used the anti-Communist youth gangs like Pemuda Pancasiila (Pancasila
Youth) to deal with opponents (Lindsey 2001: 290), Habibie, under the guise of
‘public order’, turned to a variety of paramilitary Islamic thugs or Preman groups
(van Bruinessen 2005). The use of these groups would, over the course of the
next decade, become a defining feature both in the terms of the evolution of the
Islamist agenda and in the broader relationship bet ween modes of formal and
informal security.
The 1999 elections would be the first test for Muslim political parties in the
post New Order period and for the first time since 1950, there was almost
92
unlimited freedom on the parameters of political debate. Of the 48 parties
contesting the election, 14 defined themselves as Muslim, but among them only the
PPP, the Muslim party of the Suharto era, received a significant percentage of the
vote, ending in fourth place with around 11 percent (Fealy, Hooker & White 2006:
46). Neither the Crescent Start Party (PBB), which claimed to be the true
successor to Masyumi, nor the PK received more the t wo percent of the vote
necessary to stay a registered political entity (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 69).
Megawati’s Indonesian Democrat Party, the PDI-P won 35 percent of the vote,
w hile Golkar captured 23 percent of the vote.
The result of the 1999 election posed a set of contradictory results for
those interested in the advancement of political Islam. On the one hand, Islam in
public and private life was at an unprecedented level of popularity yet political
Islam remained weaker than in the 1950s (Fealy, Hooker & White 2006: 46;
Lindsey 2001: 284). Sidel (2006) describes well the picture that emerged in the
first election after Suharto fell:
In the elections of May 1999, moreover, the fiction of a united Muslim population...
dissipated in the fragmentation and factionalism among a welter of Islamic parties
and dissolved in the face of a strong electoral sho wing by non Islamic parties,
among Muslim and non-Muslim voters alike. (210)
No doubt one of the main reasons for the fragmentation in the Muslim vote
in the 1999 election lay in that the t wo biggest current Muslim organisations – NU
and Muhammadiyah - did not vote in cohesive blocks as they had in the 1950s.
Throughout the New Order era, NU fragmented and its members case their ballots
co-equally to wards PPP, Wahid’s part the PKB and to the Golkar (Friend 2003).
Regional politics also played its hand here with NU members outside Java typically
voted PPP while Javanese members were split sub-regionally among PPP, PKS
and Golkar members (Friend 2003). Muhammadiyah experienced a similarly type
of electoral fragmentation. Whereas in 1950 Masyumi had been natural political
choice for Muhammadiyah supporters, none the parties that picked up Masyumi
93
legacy in the 1999 campaign had broad appeal. Its stated heir, the Crescent and
Star Party, distanced urban middle class supporters with its connection to the
radical dakwah organisation KISDI. Moreover, the strong association bet ween
Golkar and the ranks of the urban middle class of Muhammadiyah members
(following its ban in 1960), effectively delivered the Masyumi constituency to
Golkar. The only party with a clear Islamist electoral agenda was the PK (Justice
Party) and it failed to gain any sort of mass constituency.
With no clear winner in the 1999 election, Abdurrahman Wahid’s ascension
to the Presidency was the product of an intricate process of negotiation and
compromise. Intense jockeying on the part of Mega wati and Habibie and the threat
that mass rioting on the part of their supporters could deteriorate into full-blown
civil conflict made the choice of Wahid palatable to the political establishment
(Robison & Hadiz 2004: 241). In the election campaign, as noted earlier, the
paramilitary wings of the PDI-P (satgas) and PPP (GPK – Gerakan Pamuda
ka’bah) acted as the muscle to sell the agenda of the political parties at a street
level. While the use of Preman to do the bidding of political interest had been a
long established practice in the game of Indonesian politics, the mobilisation of
these of these forces (on all sides) in the high stakes environment of the 1999
election was particularly pernicious and would foreshado w a nasty turn in intercommunal relations in the coming years. Thus, the willingness of these groups to
use violence on behalf of their respective benefactors and the spectre of all out
civil conflict beyond the control of the government, necessitated in the mind of
political elites the need for a third choice (Robison & Hadiz 2004:241).
Among political elites, the choice of Wahid as President was not meant to
esche w a ne w politics – rather Wahid was meant to be a stabilising agent
reflecting enough change to keep people off the streets while essentially
preserving the broader structural interests of elite net works within the state
(Lane 2007). This is not to say that Wahid was completely ineffectual, but his
94
reform agenda was stymied by a general un willingness for real systemic reform
at an elite level. His real problem, however, lay in his inability to control the TNI and
members of his o wn cabinet. Wahid’s biggest challenge lay squarely in that he
w as first inheritor of the post New Order system and as such inherited a system
that functioned on the basis of official and non-official corruption. Thus he was in
the a wk ward position of having to navigate the interest of vast (and still in tact)
state patronage net works of the New Order against the demands of a populations
expecting real transformation. In the eyes of many ordinary Indonesians, there
w as a perception that even despite his personal stature, the gro wing number of
corruption scandals involving people close to him, combined with his inability to
prosecute members of the Suharto family, created a general picture of weakness
around the man. He was also dogged by the right wing of his o wn Islamist
movement who considered the inclusive and tolerant Sufi Islam he espoused to be
heretical. Anti-Wahid sentiments became a rallying cry around which Islamist
parties regrouped and brought back to the centre of politics some of the core
tensions bet ween traditionalists and modernists discussed in the last chapter.
Finally in 2002 amid gro wing calls for his impeachment, his deputy Megawati
Sukarnoputri replaced him.
Between 1999 and 2003, the biggest challenges faced by first Wahid and
then Megawati were the escalating incidents of inter-communal violence across
the archipelago. During this time Wahid and Mega wati were also faced with the
unenviable task of managing a de-centralisation project that would devolve
autonomy back to the regions while at the same time preventing the Balkanisation
of the archipelago. In this context, the struggle on the part of various groups
within the regions to retain and change their patronage structure with Jakarta
invariably led to an escalation in inter-communal strife (Sidel 2006). Moreover,
w hile structural violence between or directed against particular ethic and religious
groups had been a key feature of the New Order regime, the fragmentation
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created in its wake created a dynamic in which religion would come to play a
more dominant role in the unfolding of inter-communal problems (Bertrand 2004).
Here again, the environment of the 1999 election is fundamental to consider. The
deployment of various Preman groups and in particular the use of Muslim defence
cum vigilante groups on behalf of certain interests in that campaign, set in motion
a deteriorating security environment that would get played out on religious lines.
Here, the escalation of events from riots and violence directed at ethnic Chinese,
to the anti-Witchcraft campaigns, to the inter-communal violence bet ween Muslims
and Christians in Sulawesia, Maluku and Aceh, does not reflect either the
inevitability of religious conflict and nor does it justify the thesis that there was
gro wing pattern of Islamisation on a mass scale at work, but rather indicates the
extent to which religion can be manipulated to serve elite interests.
In evaluating the inter-communal violence in the post New Order period, its
connection to a broader pattern of religious violence and ostensibly processes of
radicalisation debates over levels of analysis, w eigh heavily. On the one hand the
intercommunal strife in Sulawesia, Maluku and Aceh were religious conflicts in
that they were fought bet ween Muslims and Christians. As such, these conflicts
became a rallying cry and prompted calls for the Muslim community to act in
defence of its o wn community. On the other hand, these conflicts were not about
religion and had more to do with either questions of autonomy or competition over
access to resources. That these confrontations have, for the most part abated,
demonstrates the extent to which acts of religious violence themselves are not
always tantamount to increased mass patterns of religious radicalisation. Thus, in
beginning to evaluate ‘tipping-points’ in the radicalisation process – that is the
particular circumstances that see individuals or group transit into acts of violence
- it becomes clear that a highly nuanced understanding of the field of observation
is necessary. For analysts, the dynamics present in Indonesia in the late 1990s
necessitate the development of a theoretical typology that goes beyond ascribing
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blame along solely religious lines.
Part 2: Shifting Terrain
The main crux of analysis in this chapter has focused on political shifts
follo wing the fall the New Order regime and its impact on the evolution of the
“Islamist space.” Now I will delve more deeply into the changing modes of Islamist
activism and the groups and patterns that emerged through the 1990s – especially
after the 1999 election. The results of the 1999 election unquestionably
demonstrate the weariness of the Indonesian electorate to wards the agenda of
fundamentalist parties. The defeat of Islam at an election, ho wever, certainly did
not simultaneously represent the defeat of Islam at a socio-culture level. Thus
w hat developed in Indonesia in the late twentieth century is similar to a pattern
that emerged in other nationstates and is best described as the emergence of
‘cultural Islam' (Hassan 2005). On a sociocultural level, the emergence of this
phenomenon exists as a product of, and an answ er to the complexities of
globalisation. In this dynamic, the failure of the nation-state to deliver on a variety
of goods has created the space for the range of groups that encourage the
‘Islamisation of the person’ from the bottom up rather than the Islamisation of
society from the top do wn.
The evolution of this phenomenon among middle class Indonesians in the
1980s and 1990s mirrors that of that UK where second and third generation men
and women of South Asian origin began to express themselves through their
Muslim identity. In finding a re-born religious identity, the adherent plays out a
different form of modernity than the one offered by globalised consumerism. In the
Indonesian context, the category of cultural Islam embodies many different styles
of practice ranging from pseudo ne w age Sufism to very austere forms of
Salafism. While ‘good Muslim’– ‘bad Muslim’ delineations can be made based on the
particulars of the theological interpretation, the common element linking all
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manifestations of cultural Islam is the desire to re-create one's identity around the
practice of religion. A number of analysts, including Greg Barton, have securitised
the “Santri-ization” of Indonesian Islam, the transition of Abangan syncretic
Muslims to the category of Santri, advancing the vie w Indonesian Islam is
“radicalising.” While there may be evidence to justify the Santrification thesis, it is
also true that this process has also enlarged the circle of Muslims who adopt a
liberal progressive understanding of Islam (Eliraz 2004: 88). Thus Santrification
does not necessarily equal radicalisation.
As I discussed in the preceding section, the shifting power structures in
post New Order Indonesia and the heightened state of competition therein
presented a particular boon for the right-flank of Islamist organisations. The
expression of the conservative agenda through the thuggery of street politics and
the attachment of these groups to secular and often criminal interests, raised the
problem of Islamism on a day-to-day level. Certainly, the presence of nominally
conservative or even radical groups is not a new phenomenon, ho wever the
realities of the post Suharto era and especially the Preman-isation of street Islam,
have changed the nature of Islamist activism across the board, especially on the
level of recruitment (Lindsey 2001). Where the “radical” movement was at one
time almost the sole purvie w of either the Dural Islam activists or university
students, the Preman-isation phenomenon opened the Islamist channel to thugs
and petty criminals. The austere theological interpretation of conservative Islam
combined with their willingness for confrontation, made this sort of recruit
particularly useful as foot soldiers in promoting anti-vice campaigns and
maintaining ‘public order' (Lindsey 2001).’ While this pattern is typified most starkly
in the development of the Front Pembela Islam – (FPI) (Islamic Defenders
Front) - it can also be seen in other organisations including Jemmah Islamiyah.
Part 3: Modes of Activism – Actors & Ideologies
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In the post New Order era, the evolution of the conservative or radical
‘Islamist space’ occurred on a similar but fundamentally different set of ideological
trajectories. In the second chapter of this work, I traced the development of
Islamism as a unique religious and socio-cultural phenomenon that developed in
four historical waves. In context of evaluating the development of Islamism in post
New Order Indonesia, there presents an interesting mix of simultaneously
functioning movements that represent all waves of revivalist ideology. Given the
doctrinal and methodological differences in these forms of activism, it is helpful to
unpack the evolution of Islamism in the post New Order era along the lines of:
Brotherhood organisation, Salafist organisation and hybrid Salafist organisations
that advance Jihad. While all of these organisation types broadly advance the
Islamisation of society and the homogenisation of Indonesian Islam along Arab
lines, there are also clear differences in their aims and ideologies. Understanding
the complex delineations and differences in modes of activism between these
groups is fundamental to understanding ho w processes of radicalisation work on
both individual and group levels.
Of all forms of contemporary Islamism, the influence of the prototypical
Muslim Brotherhood has the longest modern history in Indonesia. While initial
interest began in the 1950s, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Brotherhood
ideas and organizational techniques began to gain a real following (Bubalo &
Fealy 2005: 66). Several factors accounted for its rise in popularity including the
frustration and disillusionment at both the Old and New Orders for their treatment
of Islamist organisations and the extent to which Muslim leaders played into their
hands (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 66, ICG 2006(a)). In the context of the New Order
regime, the attraction ofBrotherhood ideology w ere the Brotherhood’s
organisational ideas, notably the emphasis on personal piety, the provision of
community service and the formation of close knit groups capable of creating a
discrete Islamised space from which the broader community might be made more
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devout (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 66). Beginning in the early 1980s, the main vehicle
for Brotherhood activism was the Gerakan Tarbiyah, which combined with DDII,
made up the largest conservative dakwah organisation operating on university
campuses and high schools. Ideologically the group followed the al-Banna strain
of Brotherhood thought on the gradual Islamisation from the ground up, and while
there have been some acceptance of Qutbist vie ws amongst some Tarbiyah
members, these vie ws have generally been interpreted in the most liberal way
(Azra 2004). From the mid 1980s on wards, the group spread throughout the
archipelago and by the early 1990s, controlled the student councils of Indonesia’s
largest and most prestigious universities (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 66, Elriaz 2004).
After playing a prominent role in the protests that led to the do wnfall of the
New Order regime, the Tarbiyah entered the political fray and its members
founded the PK party. Despite its poor sho wing in the 1999 election, the reconstituted PKS party managed to garner 7 percent of the national vote in the
2004 campaign. Rather than focusing on an overt Islamist agenda, the main 2004
platform consisted of calls to reform government and stem corruption. It remains
to be seen whether the better sho wing for PKS in 2004 compared to its poor
performance in 1999 was the increasing traction of the Islamist agenda on the
party's focus on good governance. Despite its popularity, PKS has major problems
that limit its broad appeal including its choice in legislative candidates, the
persistence of conspiratorial anti-Christian propaganda in its party platform, and
charges of financial mismanagement among senior leaders (Bubalo & Fealy 2005:
72).
Another interesting case among Brotherhood inspired organisations is the
Indonesian branch of the global Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation. I will unpack the Hizb
more thoroughly in the next chapter, but in terms of activism, it presents some key
differences from the mainstay of Brotherhood inspired organisations. While the
organisation had a reputation for strident radicalism in Europe and is banned in
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Pakistan, the Indonesian branch has maintained a record of peaceful activism, to
date has not formed a paramilitary wing, and for the most part does not take part
in “street politics” (Azra 2006) of the PKS movement. It has kept its message local
and rather than advocating the re-establishment of the caliphate, has advocated
for the application of Sharia law (Ahnaf 2006).
The development of the Salafi movement has, in many ways, much in
common with that of the Brotherhood inspired groups. As I stated earlier,
ho wever, there are also a number of key differences both structurally and
doctrinally. Like Brotherhood groups, the propagation of Salafi ideology has
occurred in direct proportion to the rise in Saudi oil wealth beginning in the 1960s
(ICG 2004, ICG2006a). Unlike many of the Brotherhood or mainstream traditionalist
organisation, ho wever, the Salafi movement remains small and the number of
students in these institutions probably number only in the thousands (Barton
2004). Most Salafi-based groups are situated around education and propagation
institutions such as the al-Sof wah Foundation, the Ihsa at-Turots Foundation, and
al-Haramain al-Khairiyah (Bubalo & Fealy 2005: 74, ICG 2004). Doctrinally, there
are also some key differences bet ween the Salafi movement and Brotherhood
inspired groups like Tarbiyah. The biggest doctrinal difference comes on the level
of emulation of Brotherhood discourse. Where Tarbiyay sees Brotherhood
thought as a guide for the Indonesian situation, Salafi groups seek to emulate
directly the cultural and religious practices of the Gulf region (Elriaz 2004, ICG
2004).
The relationship bet ween Salafism, politics and violence (including
terrorism) is complex and it would be problematic to place all Salafi groups in the
same category. Most Indonesian Salafi groups focus on religiosity and peaceful
missionary and educational activities and specially avoid political activity. This
contrasts to Brotherhood thought quite starkly w ith its pre-Qutb focus on social
activism to bring about the gradual Islamisation of society. Because the Salafi
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Ulemma is de-centralised and a fat wah can be abided or ignored on a group-bygroup basiss there is not a consistent Salafi line on violent activism (ICG 2004).
Thus while mainstream Salafis tend to ascribe primacy to Sheiks in the Persian
Gulf region, there have been several cases where Indonesian Salafi groups have
opted out of Saudi and Yemini based rulings. The largest Salafi movement in
recent history was the Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Wal Jammah (FKAWJ) and its
high profile paramilitary force, the Laskar Jihad, w ho sent fighters to engage in
Jihad against Christians in the Malucas conflict. Similarly many self-described
Salafists have aligned themselves with vigilante groups like FPI that act in defence
of what they perceive to be moral assaults on Islam (ICG 2004, ICG 2006(a), ICG
2007(a)).
In the wake of the Jihadist attacks across the region and the allegiance of
many Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) operatives to Salafi ideology, much attention is paid to
the connections bet ween it and Salafi ideology. That many JI operatives, including
those a waiting execution for the Bali bombings, have espoused Salafi ideology,
has bolstered the perception that Salafi ideology served as the agent provocateur
in the radicalisation process of those individuals (Barton 2004). While there is
some truth in this analysis, it is probably more accurate to place JI in a third
category of activism – Salafi Jihadism. The categorical division bet ween Salafism
and Salafi Jihadism reflects the latter’s ideological tendencies to ward fourth
w aveinspired revivalism that advances a conservative interpretation of Qutb’s
thinking on Jahilya and acceptability of violent Jihad. Moreover, the connection
bet ween the mainstream of the Indonesian Salafi movement and JI remains
tenuous. While JI has maintained cordial relations with a number of radical
organisations, this has not precipitated a flo w of volunteers into the JI movement
and if anything, JI actions have distanced it from mainstream of Indonesian
Islamism (ICG 2004). The public statements of many JI figures castigating the
mainstream Salafi movement for its refusal to engage in its agenda, present prima
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facie evidence of the fissures bet ween the t wo communities (Bubalo & Fealy
2004: 76) The other key doctrinal division bet ween JI and other Salafist
organisations is the former's connection to the messianic Dural Islam movement. JI
arose from ashes of MMI (Majelis Mujahidiin Indonesia), a net work comprised of
DI dissidents who came out of hiding to re-formulate their agenda in the late
Suharto era. While JI has adopted the veneer of Salafi rhetoric to communicate its
position, its experience and much of its actual practice more closely reflect the
rural Javanese heritage of DI, which mixes Islamist ideology with other syncretic
elements including the religious veneration of people within its o wn movement – a
trait that would be completely unacceptable to strict Salafists (ICG 2004).
Of the three activist typologies discussed in this section, the Salafi-Jihadist
category represents by far the one with the smallest membership base. Applying
a very loose standard, one could perhaps lump a number of other groups into the
category and thus expand the traction of its appeal, however this is problematic
because many of the groups that could be lumped into this category would remain
so only on an ad hoc basis. As discussed earlier, following the fall of the New
Order regime and the political realignments that came with it, there were a number
of groups that advocated Jihad on behalf of Muslim communities. As the case of
Laskar Jihad demonstrates, ho wever, the willingness of FKAWJ to approve Jihad
in the Malucas arose from the specific context of inter-communal strife and was
not approved as tactic for ongoing use (ICG 2006(a)). Following the cessation of
violence, the group did not adopt JI’s agenda and extend its Jihad to either
w estern or local targets. So far, JI is the only organisation that has waged violent
Jihad outside the context of inter-communal problems.
While it is impossible to completely separate JI’s activism from the broader
pattern of violent religiosity that occurred following the fall of the Suharto regime,
its agenda has been much slo wer to take root than other styles of Islamist
expression. Despite the persistence of religious violence and various
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manifestations of Islamist religiosity, the fears among some analysts that JI
represents the tip of the iceberg or the ideological vanguard for Indonesian
Islamism, have not come to fruition. Thus, there has not been a large-scale
ideological migration from one mode of Islamist expression to the other.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, I have detailed the complex role of the Islamist
agenda in post New Order Indonesia in an effort to begin to unpack the trajectory
of Islamism and how this changed dynamic impacted on the evolution of different
modes of Islamist expression. Beginning with political transformation, I discussed
the changed po wer relations in the immediate post New Order period and
highlighted the divergent vie ws within the “Islamist space” and the extent to which
this presented both a democratic opening for the Islamist agenda at an electoral
level while also increasing po wer competition among ethnic and religious groups. I
then discussed the process by which, following the 1999 election, elements
within the Islamist rubric got dra wn into Preman-isation of po wer relations and
began to act as enforcement agents of the Islamist agenda on the streets while
simultaneously serving the needs of secular interests. I then engaged in a
discussion on varying modes of Islamist expression and highlighted the many
points of disagreement between these modes of expression.
Debates over the role of Islam in Indonesian society are complex and trying
to deliver a post mortem on Islamism in this context is impossible. From the
analysis I presented, ho wever, it seems that several patterns emerge that present
important points of analysis in beginning to address processes of radicalisation.
First, it seems that despite the increased interest in cultural Islam and more
specifically manifestations of conservative or radical Islam, the project to Islamise
the nation-state has failed. The inability of the Islamist space to coalesce at the
electoral level demonstrates the fragmented nature of the mandate. While the
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electoral success of the PKS party in the 2004 election could present evidence to
the contrary, by all accounts the strength of their platform lay not in their religious
message but in their promise to clean up the political system. Second, from the
analysis presented in this chapter, there emerges a need to separate types of
religiously-inspired acts of violence. Despite a pattern that would on the surface
indicate a gro wing pattern of Islamist violence, the reality of the situation is far
more complicated and we cannot place the violence associated with the “street
Islam” of Preman groups on the trajectory as the Jihadist agenda of the JI, yet
both are Islamist organisations and advocate the use of Jihad. This demonstrates
the need to differentiate bet ween symbolic or rhetorical radicalisation and real
thing. In the end, the upsurge in Islamist violence that emerged following the
collapse of the New Order regime had more to with the secular po wer dynamic
than it did simmering religious tensions.
The other major trend to emerge from the analysis presented in this
chapter surrounds the complex delineations in the types of Islamist activism that
developed in the post Suharto period. In the last section I argued that while the
Islamist voice had evolved in the post New Order period, the ideological fissures
bet ween the types of groups made it difficult to justify the conclusion that even
radical Islam was evolving in the same direction. In regards to the theme of
radicalisation I hope what emerges from this chapter is a start to move a way from
analysis that reduces processes of radicalising to the simple exposure to certain
religious ideologies. This type of analysis is both inaccurate since it misses the
complexity in expression, and more importantly, it ignores the role of secular
forces in stoking the fires of inter-communal discord.
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Chapter 5: Radicalization - Theory and Process
The set of conclusions reached in the preceding t wo chapters on the
nature and role of Islamism in the creation of the Indonesian nation-state and in
post- Suharto Indonesia, necessitate the need to reconsider the theoretical
typologies applied in evaluating the radicalisation process of Indonesian Islamists.
Having addressed the varied modes of Islamist activism in post- Suharto
Indonesia, it becomes very clear that relying on the generic “Islamist ideology” or
Salafism as stand alone concepts to explain what drives the radicalisation
process is inadequate. The last chapter highlighted that modes of Islamist activism
(even those that most people would deem austere and intolerant), are so full of
doctrinal and ideological fault as to de-bunk the notion of a unified Islamist
movement being radicalised from the ground up. Most importantly, if the
radicalization process could be explained by exposure to Salafi ideology alone,
then why have Jihadist attacks against western targets in Indonesia decreased
and not increased over the past five years? After all, there are ten of thousands
of self-confessed Salafists in Indonesia (ICG 2004).
The gro wing cadence of Islamist inspired violence in different parts of the
w orld has, over the course of the past 15 years, sparked heightened interest in
questions over radicalisation. In this context, analysts from around the world have
been quite consistent in asking a series of “ho w ” questions in relation to the
nature and trajectory of violent Jihadism. As a result, the trajectory of research on
radicalisation forces appears to focus on questions such as: ho w many terrorists
are there?; ho w do terror cells operate?; ho w do groups recruit?; ho w do they
get funding?; ho w are various groups connected?; and of course, ho w do “ we”
prevent another attack? Because of these questions, security agencies have a
fairly good idea about ho w the al- Qaeda phenomenon operates and ho w it
finances itself. Much slo wer to develop, ho wever, has been the crucial set of
“ why” questions. Even slo wer, has been a consistent theoretical typology that
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addresses specifically the transformation processes that sees Jihadists graduate
from mere ideological conservatives to brutal killers. It would seem that for fear of
appearing either too “understanding” of the terrorists on the one hand or
offending Muslims on the other, analysts and academic have not delved seriously
into questions of radicalisation. This pattern also holds for research into the
radicalization phenomenon in Indonesia, and, as I will address later in the chapter,
there are lots of “ho w” questions” being asked in relation to the JI movement and
far fe wer “ why” questions.
In starting to ask “ why” questions” in relation to the radicalisation process
in Indonesia at both an individual and group level, the crux of relevant analysis
revolves around socialisation and transformation. That is, what are specific
factor(s) that see people and groups graduate from conservatism to becoming
willing to commit mass murder? Like all social science endeavours, this field of
inquiry weighs heavy with debates over levels of analysis. For the purposes of
analysis in this chapter, I take it as a given that Islamist religious ideology plays an
important part in macro-socialisation of the individuals and groups of concern.
While I am not questioning the role of Islamist ideology at a base level, I am
questioning the role of this ideology in the transformation process. There are
several issues I am deliberately not dealing with in this chapter including, what
attracts people to conservative forms of religion in the first place and the very
personal decision-making processes that individuals must go through in
thedecision to commit an act of terrorism.
To begin to flesh out a ne w theoretical typology that addresses the
socialising factors in the radicalisation process, this chapter endeavours to
engage several lines of inquiry. The first half of the chapter will address the
subject of radicalisation from a theoretical perspective; first I will evaluate several
leading theories on political extremism, particularly those offered by Ehud Sprinzak
and Fathali Moghaddam. Then, based on the inherent structural limitations of those
107
theories, I outline, based on the conclusions from the chapters presented so far,
an alternative model of radicalisation centred on the principle of “5 Socialising
Drivers.” The second half of the chapter will present group and individual case
studies that look more specifically at the radicalisation process at both group and
individual levels. Here I will apply the dominant theories of Sprinzak and
Moghaddam together with the “5 Socialising Drivers.” All of this will be discussed
with a vie w to gain a clearer and more systematic understanding of the
processes of transformation in the radicalisation process of self-confessed
Salafi-Jihadists.
Part 1: Theoretical Typologies of Radicalisation
As discussed at length in the first chapter, the leading theories on
radicalization processes and of ‘radical Islam’, more generally present some
serious methodological problems, and have been victim to a raft of populist and
amateur fields of scholarly endeavour. On the theme of Islamism, many wellknown scholars including the likes of Rohan Gunaratna, essentially treat Islam as
a gate way religion where exposure to some forms of activism will invariably lead
to other more sinister expressions. In applying this level of analysis, the
radicalisation process is not very complicated since it stems from basic exposure
to an ideology. As the last t wo chapters of this w ork have demonstrated,
ho wever, blaming Islamist ideology is insufficient in explaining the violent
transformation in the radicalization process.
Similarly insufficient is the course of “blame the victim” literature that has
emerged since September 11, 2001. This type of scholarship addresses the
subject of radicalization from the point of vie w of grievance and essentially
argues that the perpetrators of the attacks being seen in different parts of the
w orld attack because of the things “ we” do (Ganor 2008, Hoffman 2006). Thus if
w e, the targets, modify our behaviour, there will be fe wer attacks. This level of
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analysis is lacking since it understands neither the basis of fourth wave postQutbist revivalism nor the many local factors that drive most Islamist attacks.
Another similarly influential strain of scholarship advances the radicalisation of the
loser” thesis (Pape 2005). This theory argues that Islamism is essentially a bottomfeeding ideology that preys on the weak and vulnerable. This level of analysis is
troubling as it ignores that fourth wave revivalism was fundamentally an elite
construct, manufactured in Egypt’s universities (Ganor 2008). It may be true that
Islamism (in all its manifestations) provides an outlet for the materially, spiritually
and existentially disaffected, but that is a very w ide net to cast when it comes to
identifying who exactly becomes radicalised. Moreover, radical Islamism has
demonstrated its ability to capture the imagination of many different sorts of
people from very different backgrounds, thus defeating the idea that there is a
particular “type” that becomes radicalised.
In moving away from pop analysis of Islamist radicalisation and into more
specific theoretical typologies, the field of analysis presents a similar yet slightly
different set of challenges. It is under-theorised on a general level and especially
as it relates to the dynamics in Indonesia. In terms of specific theoretical
typologies that address processes of radicalisation in a systemic way, there are
several frameworks that could be applied to the dynamics in post-New Order
Indonesia.
Fadhali Moghaddam’s (2006) influential work, From the Terrorists' Point of
View: What They Experience and Why They Come to Destroy, offers a
comprehensive theoretical typology on Islamist radicalisation. He proposes a
“stair way” model. In his conception, the radicalisation process is incremental and
the subject passes through various stages of grievance until he or she is ready to
commit an act of violence. As a systemic approach, Moghaddam proposes five
markers or “floors” in the ideological transformation that sees certain people
become willing to commit acts of violence. These are:
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First Floor: “The syste m is unfair!”
The base level of the model addresses general dissatisfaction among the
“multitudes.” Here the identity of individuals shifts in such a way that they feel
they have no choice in decisions that impact their lives… The perceptions
associated with these feelings are shame and anger. Moghaddam relates this
condition specifically back to examples such as the US presence in the Gulf and
the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories (Moghaddam 2006: 70).
Second Floor: “Who’s to blame?”
Moving beyond mere feelings of grievance and injustice, this level addresses
those who can be held specifically responsible for the state of affairs. On this
level, the displacement of aggression remains an effective strategy by which to
remain in control. Here, Moghaddam highlights the creation of external enemies by
certain states as a means to blame-shift. In addition to external enemies, this level
sees the employment and maintenance of conspiracy theories to justify the issues
on the first floor. To exit from this level, individuals display a willingness to use
physical force. (Moghaddam 2006: 80)
Third Floor: “The ends justify the means”
By the time the individual arrives on the third floor, he or she(?) feels that there
are no more choices available. Individuals arrive on the third floor with a strong
sense of inadequate identity and are likely to seek out social groups and net works
of like- minded people. In the context of Islamist groups, these are likely to be all
male, high on conformity, obedient, risktaking, and isolated from the moderating
influence of mainstream society and will adopt a morality supportive of terrorism
(Moghaddam 2006: 96)
Fourth Floor: “It’s us against the m”
On the fourth floor the subject experiences another change in their identity in
response to the ne w social / terrorist net work they have found.they no w see
themselves as belonging to a cause and have thus constructed a rigidly divided
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w orld dominated by feelings of ‘us versus them.’ At this level, Mogahaddam
identifies the distinct roles that individuals play w ithin a terrorist organisation. Here
he offers several prototypical “types” including; (a) Source of Inspiration, (b)
Strategist, (c) Networker, (d) Expert, (e) Cell Manager, (f) Local Agitator/Guide,
(g) Local Cell Member, (h) Fodder, (i) Fund-raiser. Ascent from the fourth to the
top floor is normally predicated on the ability of the subjects to conceal their ne wly
adopted world-vie w (Moghaddam 2006: 112).
Fifth Floor: “A heroic act will improve the world”
On the top floor the subject, no w part of social net work that advocates the use of
violence and has a defined role within its structure, begins to see, or is convinced
that only direct action against the enemy will bring about any sort of chance of the
messianic sense of purpose in carrying out the act (Moghaddam 2006: 126)
Moghddam’s frame of reference for this book comes from his experience
w orking with the UN High Commission for Refugees in the Middle East and South
Asia. His focus on grievance issues as the gatew ay to radicalisation bears
particular relevance to the sociocultural circumstances of the Middle East. As
discussed later in the chapter, in the context of Indonesia, the issue of grievance
seems to be spurious as a gate way to radicalisation and thus limits the general
applicability of this theory. As it relates to processes of transformation, the
staircase model does present some useful innovations; on the third and fourth
floors, its deemphasized discussion on the contours of specific theology and its
focus instead on social movement, is useful in relation to the dynamics in
Indonesia. Moreover, its emphasis on the withdra wal of individuals into isolated
social movements seems to reflect the pattern among Jihadist suicide bombers in
Indonesia and else where (Juergensmeyer 2003).
Rather than offering a comprehensive theory of radicalisation, Ehud
Sprinzak’s “Iceberg model” evaluates the rise of political extremism among the
Gush Emunim movement in Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. By
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addressing this particular movement, Sprinzak offers a theoretical typology that
explains ho w extremists groups can gain acceptance and subtly shift the political
culture in the nation-state.
Gush Emunim has been one of the most controversial and dynamic political
movements in Israel’s history (Sprinzak 1989). In the aftermath of the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, the group succeeded in settling the area of Judea and Samaria (in the
occupied territories) against the publicly expressed wishes of the Israeli Cabinet.
Despite strained relations with the government, over the next 20 years, the
movement succeeded in gaining a large support base among ordinary Israelis on
both sides of the Green Line. Through the 1970s, the agenda of Gush and its
support base directed the Israeli government’s policies on the construction of
settlements in the occupied territory. In this context, Gush Emunim reflected bipartisan support within Israel for the idea of a Greater State of Israel. Due to
shifts in government policy, ho wever, and as a result of the first Intifada, Gush
employed progressively more aggressive tactics to maintain its agenda and its
members have been implicated in assaults on both Israeli soldiers and
Palestinians. Sprinzak maintains that the real pow er of the Gush phenomenon is
part of a broader socio-religious phenomenon in Israel that represents only the tip
of an iceberg of a broader religious subculturethat started its meteoric
development in the 1950s (Sprinzak 1989).
To attempt to unpack its rise and explain Gush’s influence, Sprinzak uses
the concept of the 'tip of the iceberg' to describe the extremist movement. He
argues the base, like that part of the iceberg that is submerged, is a complete
social and cultural system broadening towards the (non-extreme) base (Sprinzak
1989). The extremist group is not detached from this base, and when necessary,
can make use of all of its vast resources. One result of this structure is that the
extremist group is limited—much more than it at times appears -by the large
pyramidal base belo w the water's surface (Sprinzak 1989). When warm weather
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raises the water temperature, the iceberg melts somewhat and then the tip—the
extremist group— loses much of its acuity (Sprinzak 1989). That is what
happened to Gush Emunim from the beginning of the Likud Government to the
Camp David Accords some two years later. During this period it was promised
more influence in the corridors of po wer, and as a result, its extremism was
muted. It stressed inside work rather than extra-parliamentary action. This was
only temporary, though, and the policies of the Barak and then the late Sharon
period, sa w relations bet ween it and government deteriorate. Thus by the late
1990s, everything “froze” and the sharpness of the Gush Emunim iceberg
became apparent once again, to the point of a terrible isolation and a return to its
old tactics (Sprinzak 1989).
While Israel’s dynamics with right- wing settlers in the occupied territory
and the problem of Islamist radicalisation in Indonesia may seem on the surface to
be very different, there are fundamental points of similarity. Both nation-states
have groups with agendas based in radicalised religiosity that for generations
have refused to be bound by the rule of secular law. Moreover, both nationstates face the public policy challenge of having to appease small but influential
theologically conservative communities. Thus Sprinzak’s Iceberg Model presents
some interesting levels of analysis on cultures of radicalised political ideology. The
theory demonstrates ho w a radical tip and moderate base act in concert to direct
policy.
This case also highlights the waxing and waning nature of relations
bet ween the state and certain types of extremist organisations. In Indonesia,
there is little evidence to suggest that there is any mass support for the extreme
Salafi-Jihadist organisations (Umam 2006). The case of Gush, ho wever, highlights
the complexity of bringing certain types of organisations to the table of policy
debates. Recent examples on the role of Islamist organisations in the public policy
sphere include, the anti-pornography legislation of 2007, violence in anti-vice
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campaigns, and recent banning of the Shia sect Ahmadiyah. In all of these
instances, the state was faced with a difficult decision to either isolate the
Islamist movement by ignoring their demands over these issues of help or
potentially help erode the secular nature of the state. Just as the Israeli
government has to manage its relations with right- wing settlers, the Indonesian
government must balance the agenda of various Islamist factions.
Part 2: Radicalisation re-considered
The theoretical typologies of radicalisation presented in the last section
dealt with the theme of transformation in a very general way. Moghaddam
proposes a comprehensive decontextualised look that begins with societal
grievance, while Sprinzak takes a very contextualised look at the influence of
extremism in the Israeli body politik. The lack of a specific typology that addresses
the issues of transformation and the dynamic in an Indonesia context presents the
need for the development of a ne w theoretical typology. The process of applying
a theoretical typology to a phenomenon as inherently complex and regionally
specific as the radicalisation of terrorists presents many difficult questions. To
w hat extent can a regionally de-contextualised typology work? Is it possible to
develop one theory that explains all processes of Islamo-Jihadist radicalisation? In
an attempt to engage with these questions and to focus more specifically on the
theme of transformation in the radicalization process, I propose a slightly different
orientation to the theme than either offered by Moghaddam or Sprinzak. As I have
established throughout this and the preceding chapters, ascribing processes of
radicalisation or transformation in the radicalisation process on expressions of
theology is problematic.
I propose that to develop a regionally appropriate and nuanced
understanding of the radicalisation process, consideration of the process of
Jihadist radicalisation through the lens of five autonomously functioning
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“socialising drivers:” (1) social network (2) leadership, (3) ideology, (4) time
pressure and (5) criminality is needed. By understanding ho w these
drivers function, both autonomously and in relation to one another, a more
accurate picture emerges on the transformation process of Jihadists. This
typology, rather than attempt to explain the process by way of either societal
grievance or versions of bad theology, addresses in a synergistic manner the
complex socio-cultural factors that contribute to the transformation process.
Social network. The social network driver is probably the best understood
of all the drivers I propose. Over the course of the past 15 years, a detailed body
of scholarship has addressed the nature and structure of Jihadist cells in
different parts of the world. From this body of scholarship, it is understood that
the deeply knit bonds and inter woven communal structures around Jihadist cells
is one of the defining features of the phenomenon and plays a prima facie role in
violent transformation (Bloom 2005, Pape, 2005). The focus on a closely knit
social structure is co-equally derived from the broadly Salafi origins of the
phenomenon with its focus on small study groups together with the post Qutbist
Brotherhood desire to build authentic communities. On a practical level, the
importance of the social net work aspect because, in many cases, cells have to
function in secrecy or at least outside the norm of mass society, which requires a
degree of isolation (Bloom 2007). These bonds, ho wever, do not necessarily
have to be local in nature, and with the expansion of technology and
deterritorialised nature of post Qutbist fourth wave revivalism, the Internet could
be just as influential in forming social networks as a madrasa or pesentren.
In the context of the transformation process in Indonesia, the social
net work driver is particularly crucial. Several JI operatives are not only related to
one another but studies also share deep social connections as demonstrated in
the infamous Ngruki Pesentren in West Java (ICG 2006(a)). The importance of
social net work is again highlighted in the Dural Islam movement where
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connections bet ween its members go back generations. Given the deep personal,
business and familial connections bet ween DI members and the JI, the idea of
“smashing cells” may be more difficult than security officials assume. Thus,
putting someone in jail and breaking a social netw ork are t wo very different
things. In the case of JI, the social net work aspect is about more than a group of
people that has come together to launch an attack, and instead represents
particular communities of young men with deep bonds to one another (ICG
2006(b)). The transformative capacity of these inter-personal connections cannot
be do wnplayed in the radicalisation process.
Leadership. Leadership has proven to be another key element in the
violent transformation of Salafi-Jihadist groups. In a report for the Australia
Strategic Policy Institute, Martin-Jones, Ungerer and Bergin (2007) highlight the
transforming capacity of particular leaders of Dutch Islamist groups. In his seminal
w ork, The Islamist (2006), the author, Ed Husain, a former Hizb ut’Tahrir activist
in the UK, details the cult of personality that formed around the group’s core
leadership structure and the ability of local leaders to inculcate young male
recruits. Similarly, leaders like Shiek Oman Adbel Rahman (the blind sheikh) and
Sheikh Yassin (Hamas) have engendered tremendous amounts of personal
loyalty on the part of followers. Thus in addressing processes of transformation,
beyond ideology itself, the presence of strong leader seems to be crucial in
dictating the trajectory of escalation leading tow ards violence.
Ideology. The role of ideology has been discussed at some length here
already and as I have argued, the potency of Salafist ideology cannot be
overlooked at a base level. All suicide attacks justified in defence of or inspired by
Islam, have in one way or another, been based in Salafi ideological precepts. The
connection bet ween piety and violent transformation, however, is difficult to
measure, and the publicly available data on Jihadists in Indonesia indicates that far
from being well-studied theologians, operatives such as Imam Samudra and Ali
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maintain only a crude grasp of the Qu’ran (ICG 2006(a)).
The role of ideology in the process of violent transformation in JI members
is further complicated by the evolving nature of the JI organization itself. Chalk and
Ungerer (2008) maintain that the group’s ostensible manifesto, Pedoman Umum
Perjuangan Al‑Jama’ah Al‑Islamiyya (PUPJI or General Guide for the Struggle of
JI, which was first documented in the 1990s) envisaged the greater Islamisation
of the archipelago through a t wo-step process. The first is to cultivate a
puritanical organisation whose members have a strong sense of religious, social,
political and, most importantly military identity; the second is to use the group as a
platform from which to launch armed jihad (jihad musallah) that is directed
against ‘infidels, polytheists, apostates, atheists and the [morally] corrupt’ and
aimed at the ultimate creation of a theocratically pure pan‑regional Islamic
caliphate (Chalk & Ungerer 2008). However, like the Egyptian Muslim Broterhood
there has been discord bet ween camps within the JI organization over the
transition bet ween steps one and t wo and the extent to which the tactics of
Salafi Jihadism (Fourth Wave Islamist revivalism) are congruous with the
traditional Javanese Islamism that underpins the JI agenda. This vie w is further
reflected in the analysis of Chalk and Ungerer (2008) who agrue that:
“The lucidity of JI’s ideological and operational vision has suffered in recent
years... In particular, an increasingly serious disjuncture has emerged
between two main factions: a ‘pro‑bombing’ group that advocates ‘fasttracking’ the goal of a pan‑regional Islamism by engaging in a sustained
campaign of suicide bombings across Southeast Asia—even if these are
likely to result in civilian Muslim deaths and injuries—and a somewhat more
traditionalist bloc (known as the ‘bureaucrats’) that asserts indiscriminate
attacks are not sanctioned by PUPJI and that JI’s end-state can only be
brought about by Islamising the whole of Indonesia in order to ‘positively’ tilt
the religious balance of the wider region (10).”
Thus, while ideology might play a vital part in the conservatisation of the subject,
the process of violent transformation is better explained by other drivers in this
typology.
Time pressure. The time pressure driver describes the influence of
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external events, both local and international, in the transformation process. As the
discussion the last chapter highlighted, the timing of attacks are not random and
typically follo w a predictable pattern of events, coinciding with major shifts in the
structures of society. The upsurge in Islamist religiosity at the end of the Suharto
period, for example, was driven by a distinctly secular set of circumstances that
manifested in an expression of inter-communal violence based on religious lines.
The escalating pattern of JI violence in the early 2000s is the by-product of
opportunity combined with the regional dynamics that were highlighted in the last
chapter more than a response to external events (ICG 2007(a)).
The time pressure presented by world events offers a similar but more
complicated set of dynamics. In this context, the actions of the US government are
frequently cited as the inspiration for attacks on American targets, intended as a
sort of pay back. The impact of the time pressure concept as it related to extra
regional events, ho wever, remains unconvincing. Despite the ongoing US
occupation of Iraq and the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, together with the Israeli
incursion into Lebanon in 2006, there has not been a marked upsurge in Jihadist
attacks in either Europe or Southeast Asia. While external events may be
peripheral in the transformation process, it is the synergistic effect of local
condition mixed with opportunity that makes the time pressure driveract as a
potent escalator in the radicalization process.
Criminality. The criminality driver is the least theorised of all the socialising
drivers have advanced and is potentially the most important in looking to address
the violent transformation of groups. Generally, this driver describes the need for
people with certain skills sets in terror net working and the escalation toward
violence for groups that possess operatives with certain skill sets. Crossing the
threshold from being an ideological radical to one prepared to commit a grievous
act of violence is not only an existential process it is also a practical one. To plan
and carry out an attack, groups need to source w eapons and materials not legally
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available and recruit people who already possess this type of knowledge. This is
easier than teaching the craft of criminal banditry to an ideological conservative
with no inherent criminal experience or inclination. As the attempted bombing of
the Edinburgh Airport demonstrates, being inspired to commit violent Jihad and
having the practical capacity for this are very different things.
Part 3: Comparative Group & Individual Case Studies
In this chapter, I have presented t wo leading theoretical typologies of
radicalization and extremism and then, based on their limitations, I presented a
typology that considers five independent drivers in the transformation process –
social net work, leadership, ideology, time pressure and criminality. To further
delve into the radicalisation process and to test the effectiveness of the theories
presented, it is necessary to present a series of group and individual case
studies.
The group case studies I present in this section evaluate t wo of the most
ideologically extreme manifestations of the Islamist agenda in Indonesia over the
past 15 years, Jemmah Islamiyah and Laskar Jihad. I choose these t wo groups in
particular because both have prototypically demonstrated the biggest capacity for
violence and group mobilisation. As discussed in the preceding chapter, not all
radical manifestations of Islam lead to acts of violence. It follows, therefore, that in
the context of the radicalisation process, I address the groups that have sho wn a
propensity for violent religiosity as opposed to other forms of religious activism.
Of course this is not to say that JI and Laskar Jihad are the only organisations that
have advocated a violent Islamist agenda; other groups, including the Islamic
Defenders Front (FPI), could possibly fit the purview of a violent Islamist
organisation, ho wever the vigilante nature of FPI, its agenda, and connection to
secular political agendas and organised crime, make less it less relevant for the
determining transformation in the radicalisation process.
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To this end, I will elaborate on the rise of JI and Laskar Jihad as a case
study using five evaluation criteria including: background, aims / ideology,
structure, recruitment method, targets. Following my analysis of the net work, I will
evaluate both case studies through my Five Drivers theory.
Group Case Studies: The rise of Laskar Jihad and JI
Group Evaluation Criteria: Laskar Jihad
(A) Background:
The Laskar Jihad first came to public attention in early 2000. It was formed
in response to the inter-communal conflict in the Maluccus and the
apparent inability of the government to protect Muslims there (van
Bruinessen 2005). The movement that became Laskar Jihad had, until the
latter's formation, been an apolitical one influenced by Salafism.
(B) Leadership & Structure:
The group’s leader, Ja’far Umar Thalib, is a ultra-conservative Salafi
preacher of Hadrami distraction and was educated at a number of
conservative institutions in Indonesia including the Saudi funded Lembagu
Ilmu Pengetahuan Islam dan Arab (LIPIA) in Jakarta (Umam 2006). In the
mid-1980s, he travelled to Saudi Arabia where he received further
theological training and then served as a volunteer in the Afghan
Mujahideen. Upon his return to Indonesia, he took up proselytizing activities
and bet ween 1994 and 1999, the group maintained an apolitical message.
Inspired by his o wn experience in the Mujahideen and angered at the
perceived inability of the Indonesians to protect Muslims, he sought a Salafi
legal opinion for the operation. As discussed in the last chapter, the Laskar
Jihad was part of FWAKJ, a loose net work of different Salafist forces.
While Laskar spearheaded, other volunteers kept a degree of autonomy.
(C) Aims/ideology:
Laskar Jihad’s ideology contains a number of counter-intuitive signs. On
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the one hand, following its strict Salafi credo, the group does not believe
that Islam enjoins a specific economic or political system and as such, it
rejects the notion of democracy and popular sovereignty as conflicting
with Islam (van Bruinessen 2002). Thalib also maintain that because
Indonesia is already a majority Muslim state and because Indonesians there
are free to practice Islam without fear of persecution, there is no need to
Islamise the state directly (Stern 2003). As such, it considers the struggle
to improve each member's quality as a Muslim more important than a
political agenda. Conversely, its connection to politically active dakwah
organisations and its alleged connection to elements within the TNI and
intelligence service, demonstrate a degree of political activism (Umam
2006).
(D) Recruitment method:
Laskar dre w its membership base from a mix of Salafi student activists
and Indonesian veterans of the Afghan Mujahideen.
(E) Targets:
In 1999, the simmering inter-communal conflict in the Maluccas prompted a
shift of Thalib’s FWAKJ network into radical activism. After receiving a
fat wa from the Salafi Imams in Saudi Arabia sanctioning the venture, the
Laskar Jihad opened training camps in West Java and began sending
thousands of volunteers to the Maluccas as “relief workers.” Bet ween
1999 and 2002, FWAKJ activists allied with Laskar Jihad participated
actively in the violent clashes bet ween Muslims and Christians in the
Maluccas.
(F) Current Operational Status:
The group was disbanded abruptly at a meeting of the FKAWJ legislative
board in October 2002. Several factors, both secular and religious, seem
to influence Thalib’s decision to do this. First, Thalib was becoming
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increasingly worried about the politicisation of its member base, and
w anted his followers to return to a purely internal practice. Second, due to
its size and presence in the Maluccus, it was likely that President Wahid
w ould have, at some stage, acted to forcefully rein in Laksar’s activities.
Following the attacks of the September 11, at the request of the US
government, Thalib was detained and questioned about his connections to
Osama bin Laden. Laskar remained opposed to the US intervention in
Afghanistan but did not participate in any protests. To date Laskar Jihad
has not been re-constituted.
Group E valuation Criteria: JI
Background:
As stated at the beginning of this section, JI represents the most
pernicious manifestation of Islamist inspired violence in the post-Suharto
era. At the height of its activity in the early 2000s, JI had a cell network
across Southeast Asia and perpetrated the deadliest terrorist attacks
against civilians in the region. The organisation w as founded in 1993 by
the former Dural Islam leaders, Abu bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar.
Both men were connected to Komando Jihad and Ba’asyir was jailed from
1978 to1982 for his part in a spate of attacks in the 1970s. From the mid
1970s through the late 1990s, Ba’asyir and Sungkar ran the al-Mukmin
pesentren in Ngruki, Java. The Ngruki network served both as a key
conduit in the propagation of Salafist-Jihadist ideas, and in the transport of
Indonesian volunteers to Afghanistan to fight in the Mujahideen (Barton
2004). Following the return of the Mujahideen volunteers and as a result of
the Islamisation of the late Suharto period, the Ngruki network, from the mid
1990s on wards, adopted an increasingly radical stance resulting finally in
an escalating pattern of violence.
Leadership & Structure:
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Like other Salifi-Jihadist organisations, the JI functions through a series of
net works under the “spiritual overlordship” of an autonomous spiritual
leader. In 1996, Sungar and other leaders formalised the structure of JI and
set it forth in a book called General Guidelines for the Jemaah Islamiyyah
Struggle (Barton 2004). According to the book, the command structure of
JI was to be headed by an amir – Abdullah Sungkar (after his death in
1999 Abubakar Ba’asyir assumed the position), w ho appointed and
directed a general council. The council was headed by a central command
overseeing four mantiqi, or geographical spheres of operation. On an
operational level, the organisation was divided into regional sub-groupings
(Mantiqi I: Malaysia-Singapore, Mantiqi II: Western Indonesia, Mantiqi III:
Mindanao, Sabah and Sulawesi and Mantiqi IV: West Papua and Australia)
(Barton 2004, ICG 2006(a)). In addition to the original leadership structure,
a number of affiliated networks not directly under its control emerged
including, most significantly, the Noordin networks, which were
responsible for the Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing in 2003 and Australian
Embassy bombing in 2004. Subsequent to the Australian Embassy and
Jakarta Marriott attacks, in 2005 ideological fissures within the JI
community emerged and its organisational structure fragmented (ICG
2007(a))
Aims / ideology:
While JI is nominally Salafist in its worldvie w, its true ideology is better
represented as a mixture of fourth wave post Qutbist revivalism combined
with the syncretic ideology of the Dural Islam movement. This discourse
combines the anti- western radicalised politics of resentment, with the
desire to overthro w the secular Republic of Indonesia in favour of a
theocratic state based on the idea of a regional Caliphate that
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encompasses parts of Southeast Asia and Australia (Chalk & Ungerer
2008). Elements within the net work maintain antipathy to wards the
mainstream Salafi community for
its refusal to engage in Jihad (ICG 2005
(b)). Thus, unlike Laskar Jihad, JI
maintains an entirely political agenda to
reorganise the basis of the Indonesian nation-state around the precepts
of Islam.
Recruitment method:
Like Laskar Jihad, the recruitment patterns of JI generally follow a social
net work model centred on institutions of learning together withpersonal
and family connections. This is highlighted most starkly by the
disproportionate number of JI operatives that have emerged from two
particular sources, the Laqmanul School in Malaysia (closed in 2002) and
al-Mukmin in Ngruki, Java (ICG 2007 (a)). The Laqmanul School in particular
became a nerve centre for the Noordin Network, and most leading JI
operatives maintained an affiliation with this school. That JI’s
recruitment has so far not extended beyond the family and personal
net works of existing members or the institutions mentioned above,
demonstrates the unpopularity of the Salafi-Jihadist agenda among
mainstream Islamists.
Targets:
JI’s escalation towards violence began in 2000 with a series of attacks on
churches, culminating in the Christmas Eve bombings in Jakarta and five
other Indonesian cities that left 19 dead (Fealey, Hooker and White
2006: 49). Following this, JI began targeting westerners, launching
massive bomb attacks on nightclubs in Bali on 12 October 2002, the
Jakarta Marriott Hotel in August 2003, the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in
September 2004, and then Bali again on Oct 1 2005 (ICG 2006(a), Fealey,
Hooker and White 2006: 49). Like Laskar Jihad, the group’s transformation
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from rhetorical or symbolic radicalism to actual violence occurred within
the dual context of the inter-communal strife of the late 1990s and the
individual experience of Afghan Mujahideen volunteers.
Current Operational Status:
While key JI figures such as Noordin Top still remain at large, the success
of a number of police raids over the past t wo years have stymied the
operational capacity of the JI network. As a result, the ICG maintains that JI
is going through an ideological metamorphosis that is pushing it in two
directions. On the one hand, groups inspired by previous JI attacks will
continue to bomb western targets. At the time, ho wever, the ICG maintains
that mainstream elements within of the net work are moving a way from
attacks on western targets and to wards the greater Islamisation of the
nation-states through a number of means including, public vice and morality
campaigns, and demanding that regional judges enforce shari’a law (ICG
2007 (b)). While JI probably poses less risk to w estern interests in the
archipelago, the threat that their operation could spa wn intra-Muslim
discord is quite acute.
Despite the doctrinal and organisational differences in JI and Laskar Jihad,
the case studies presented above reveal some broad patterns in relation to the
radicalisation process, confirming to some extent the efficacy of the Five Drivers
Model as a relevant model through w hich to vie w and analyse processes of
transformation. First, in addressing the pattern of transformation towards violent
activism, the time pressure driver seems to be particularly important. The trend of
both organisations to wards violent activism was born from the changed (secular)
geo-political condition on the ground in Indonesia in the late 1990s. Moreover, both
organisations also benefited from the Islamist turn of the late Suharto period.
Supporting the relevance of time pressure in the violent transformation of both
groups was the experience of senior members in the Afghan Mujahideen. Aside
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from religious motivation, the Afghanistan experience provided the skills
necessary to engage an insurgent like struggle else where and further highlights
the relevance of the criminality drivers in the transformation process. The time
pressure driver also impacted the trajectory on an ideological level. JI’s long-term
focus on the continuation of the DI agenda means that even if weakened it will
likely continue its struggle through attacks on western targets or threatening
judges who do not impose shari’a law. Conversely, Laskar Jihad's focus on
purely the Salafist goal of personal piety, meant that their violent activism did not
extend beyond the purvie w of aiding Muslims in the context of inter communal
strife.
In addition to the primacy of time pressure, on an operational level the
net work driver has sho wn itself to be a crucial area of analysis in assessing
patterns of violent transformation. JI, in particular, evolved from being a terror
organisation comprised of cells and net works, into complex social movements
comprised of inter- woven personal and familial contacts born from decades of
contact (ICG 2006(b)). The case of Bali bombing mastermind, Aly Ghufron
Nurhasyim – or Mukhlas, clearly demonstrates the depth of social inter-connection
in the JI network. He matriculated from the al-Mukmin pesentren in Ngruki 1982,
and in the 1980s he volunteered in Afghanistan. Upon his return to Indonesia,
Mukhlas took up a leadership role in the JI network, married Ba’asyir's sister, and
w as eventually selected by Sungar to serve as the rector of Laqmanul School
(ICG 2005(a)). The case of Mukhlas reflects the extent to which patterns of
violent transformation can be understood in relation to the depth of enmeshment in
the social structure of the organisation. Thus in its initial phase of violent activism
in the early 2000s, JI did not use nameless, faceless operatives to execute its
operations, but rather trusted members of its inner circle.
The role of leadership in the violent transformation of Islamist inspired
terrorism presents some important but contradictory signs. In the case of Laskar
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Jihad, it was the personality of Jafar umar Thalib that drove the groups’ escalation
to wards violent activism and that sa w the group disband completely. In the
context of JI, however, the role of leadership in violent transformation appears to
be more complicated. Certainly Ba’asyir and Sungar provided ideological
inspiration and created the ideological framework for the movement. Connecting
the po wer of their personalities to the planning and execution of specific attacks
remains difficult, ho wever, especially as Ba’asyir denies his involvement in the JI
organisation. In the mid 2000s, JI devolved from a centralised organisation to one
that functioned through a series of cells and larger social net works (Abuza
2003). In this context, some nuance is necessary in unpacking the role of
leadership and in the case JI, it is more likely that individual cell and net work
leaders like Noordin Muhamad Top played a more important role in the violent
transformation of individual cell members than ‘big players’ like Ba’asyir.
Similar to the role of leadership, determining the precise role of ideology as
the transformational driver in the radicalisation process of Islamist terrorists is
difficult to assess. On the surface this may seem counter-intuitive especially
because this discussion centres on people and groups that justify their actions in
defence of Islam. As I have discussed at length throughout the preceding
chapters, ho wever, the connection bet ween piety and violent transformation
remains convenient and illusive. If simple exposure to certain ideology was the
sole agent of radicalisation, then it reasons that the thousands of students that
passed through the Ngruki and pesentren would all be equally disposed to violent
transformation. That this did not happen and that JI remained small and isolated,
refutes the primacy of the ideological driver in the process of violent
transformation. Similarly, in the context of Laskar Jihad, that its operations did not
extend beyond the purvie w of the inter-communal problems of the early 2002
problematises the notion of a broader Salafist threat to the nation-state. This is not
to say that the propagation of austere theologies like Salafism do not pose the
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potential to have a corrosive effect on the cause of religious pluralism because
they do, but its connection to processes of violent transformation remain
problematic. In the case of JI, the thinking of Ba’asyir and Sungar were ideological
products of the Dural Islam movement as much as they were products of fourth
w ave revivalism and have vacillated between the t wo. Moreover, the ICG in its
2007 report on the current state of JI argues that groups turn against strikes that
inflict mass casualties. This vie w fundamentally problematises the primacy of
Salafi-Jihadist ideologyin its current project to Islamise the state and highlights the
mlultiplicity that inform JI idelogocial position. Based on all of this I conclude that
w hile not relevant, the impact of the ideological driver is predicated on other
conditions.
Conclusion
This chapter has engaged the theme of radicalisation from both theoretical
and practical perspectives. I began by discussing some of the problems
associated with the dominant levels of analysis in the field, and then I examined
t wo of the leading theoretical typologies that explain radicalisation and extremism.
I then offered an alternative vie w of violent transformation and applied the theory
to t wo of the most violent Jihadist groups that arose in post New Order Indonesia.
My intent in approaching the subject in this way w as to problematise dominant
thinking in the field of radicalisation and to transcend simple lines of logic that
ascribe responsibility for the violent transformation to a single phenomenon.
On a theoretical level, I have attempted to disconnect issues of grievance
and versions of fla wed theology from being the primary engines of radicalisation.
Here, the comparative case studies of JI and Laskar Jihad demonstrate that the
complex trajectories involved in violent transformation need to be analysed
beyond the ‘Muslim rage’ thesis. While individual terrorists have provided prolific
justification for their actions based in Muslim theology, there is nothing uniquely
transformative about the ideological discourse of ‘Muslim rage’ and it remains a
128
tenuous methodology through which to explain violent transformation, especially
in Indonesia. While there are lots of Muslims in Indonesia that espouse a discourse
of radicalised resentment attached to the perception of global Muslim victimisation,
this vie w has not translated into a greater attraction to the discourse of JI. Thus it
is important not to confuse radicalised politics of resentment common across the
Muslim world with other indicators of violent transformation. Similarly, expressions
of certain types of theology, while problematic, are also inconclusive in explaining
violent transformation.
In proposing the Five Drivers Model of radicalisation and applying it to JI
and Laskar Jihad, my intent has not been to suggest that this model explains
every facet of the radicalisation process. Nor has it been my intent to suggest that
there is one driver above others responsible for processes of violent
transformation. In the unique context of the t wo Indonesian Jihadist groups
addressed, I maintain that the relevance of this model is contingent upon looking at
the drivers presented as inter-dependent agents of socialisation. Thus, the
relevance of time pressure or ideology cannot be understood without also
addressing the role of leadership or social netw orks. While incomplete, this
typology highlights the complexity of the radicalisation process and demonstrates
the need to evaluate the tipping-point in processes of violent transformation as a
multi-faceted process that cannot be reduced to a single level of analysis.
129
Conclusion
Throughout the preceding five chapters I have presented a vie w of
Islamism and its role in the socialisation of Jihadists in a way that transcends the
theoretical reductionism that permeates the dominant discourse in the fields of
terrorism and security studies research. In presenting a contextualised vie w of
radicalisation that takes into account the role and evolution of the nation-state as a
prima facie socialising actor I have demonstrated that neither religious ideology
nor societal grievances alone are adequate to explain the process by which
Islamists become inspired to commit acts of violence. As such, this thesis has
demonstrated the complexity of the radicalisation process and has sho wn the
extent to which the dynamics associated with radicalisation processes need to
be analysed through the lens of a number of socialising drivers.
Finding grand narratives on the theme of radicalisation in Indonesia is
difficult and the extent to which any one theoretical typology can completely
explain processes of individual and group transformation remains a hotly
contested subject. This thesis has presented a social science analysis of the
radicalisation process and as such has dealt with a series of specific sociopolitical questions relating to the evolution of the nation-state and role of Islamist
agenda within that framework. The conclusions of this thesis raise more
questions than they provide ans wers and the quest to develop a consistent
theoretical typology that explains violent transformation in the radicalisation
process of Jihadists in Indonesia will no doubt be one that will need to be
unpacked in more depth at the doctoral level. While more research on this theme
needs to be engaged the trajectory of analysis offered in this thesis does begin to
offer some insight into the dynamics that sees particular Islamist groups commit
acts of violence. Despite the time, financial and methodological constraints of this
project it demonstrates several key points which are useful in the greater
130
scholarly endeavour to understand processes of violent transformation of the
Indonesian Islamists. These points include the following:
1. The current field of terrorism and security studies has grossly overestimated the role of theology in processes of violent transformation
among Islamo- Jihadist groups in Indonesia;
2. In looking to explain processes of radicalisation casting global
conspiracies that link groups in the region into the web of “global terror” is
highly problematic.
3. Securitising Islam in the Indonesian context does not yield ans wers that
explain processes of violent transformation.
From both a theoretical and ideological perspective my overarching task in
this thesis has been to problematise the connection between Islamism (in all its
manifestations) and the vexed issue of violent transformation. The second
chapter of this thesis examined the theme of Islamism from both a theoretical and
historical perspective and I discussed the plurality of voices that exist within the
Islamist space. Further, I challenged the assumption that the current field of
scholarship can securitise all manifestations of Islamism to fit the needs of post
September 11 thinking on the relationship bet ween religiosity and expressions of
violence. The second chapter highlighted the complex relationship that exists
bet ween the Islamist agenda and the forces of secular nationalism and the extent
to which the project to violently Islamise the nation-state arose as a direct result
of the subjugation of second wave Islamists thinkers at the hands of secular
nationalist leaders. The broad delineations that evolved within the rubric of the
Islamist space both in the Middle East and in Indonesia, and the divergent vie ws
contained within and among those movements, present severe challenges in
looking to explain processes of violent transformation through expressions of
theology alone. What seems clear ho wever, from the conclusions in the second
131
chapter is that violent Islamism seemed to arise in direct proportion to both its
failure to succeed on a popularist level and by its subjugation on the part of
secular leaders. In this context, the right wing fringe of the Islamist space
withdre w from the marketplace of mainstream politics and into either isolation or
violent opposition to the state. Despite the persistence of individuals and groups
that maintained a vision to Islamise the state there is an absence of agreement
among the parties on ho w best to achieve this. Thus, in contemporary Indonesia
w e see a plurality of Islamist voices spanning all four waves of Islamist thought
without a broad consensus on ho w or what the specific parameters of an
Islamised Indonesia would look like. Moreover, the citizens of Indonesia, like in a
majority of other Muslim dominant states, are and remain cool to the idea of broad
Islamisation. This does not mean that there is an interest for various Islamist
causes on the civil society level but there seems to be little or no interest in the
project to Islamise the nation-state or the violent activism of groups like JI and in
fact, the violent activism has only succeeded in isolating the Islamist voice from
mainstream public opinion.
In the third chapter I specifically addressed the complex role of Islam in the
creation of the Indonesian nation-state and challenged the vie w that the rise of
violent Muslim religiosity occurred specifically within the context of the post
September 11 era. In the third I discussed at length the extent to which debates
over doctrinal interpretations of Islam and the w ay those ideas were or were not
implemented into the project of the nationstate has been a perennial issue in the
geo-politics of the region. In the post September 11 era there has been an
unfortunate consensus amongst terrorism and security scholars on the
transmission of ideas from the Middle East to the archipelago and in this chapter I
highlighted the complex and historical relationship bet ween the centre and
periphery of the Muslim worlds and the extent to which whilst ideas from the
Middle East have been deeply influential in the unfolding of Islamism in the region,
132
the ideas adopted from the Middle East have been indigenised and run through the
unique socio-religious filter of the region. Since the attacks in Bali and Jakarta and
the nominal allegiance like JI to Salafi ideology there has been considerable
attention paid to the trend of Salafi activism in the region. In the third chapter I
discuss this issue at length and related my analysis of the findings of the second
chapter, which challenges the assumption that Salafism alone can and should be
vie wed as a terrorist ideology.
Most significantly the third chapter began to introduce the idea that the
specific dynamics that lie at the core of the radicalisation of groups need to be
analysed through the evolution of the nation-state itself and to this end, the third
chapter discussed at length the role of Islam and the Islamist agenda in the
creation of the Indonesian nation-state following the Second World War.
Moreover, I discussed Islam as one of many competing ideologies that would
serve as the guide for the ne w nation and the process by which Islam was
rejected by the mainstream of Indonesia to be the sole guiding parameter of its
nationalism. In addressing the complex role of Islam in the Indonesian nation-state
follo wing its independence in 1947, I discussed at length the process by which
the forces of Islam were both co-opted and subjugated by secular nationalist
leaders for political ends. The Dural Islam movement was in particular a serious
and violent challenge to the sovereignty of the Indonesian nation-state and
Sukarno’s ability to put the movement down show ed both his antipathy to wards
the Islamist agenda and the extent to which mainstream Indonesia was not
interested in this agenda either. I then highlighted the process by which Suharto
rose to po wer and his use of the Islamist space to achieve that end. In unpacking
the politics of the New Order, Suharto’s management of the Islamist space proved
to be fundamental to the development of the discourse that sa w groups like JI
emerge. Whilst Suharto didn’t have natural enemies or allies he found the Islamist
voice to be an effective means by which to control groups that were not loyal to
133
his agenda. In particular, the use of ex-Dural Islam members by Indonesia’s
intelligence service against PKI members was a prime example of this and his
simultaneous de-politicisation of religion combined with his use of various
Islamists groups in constructing a corporatised state with institutionalised violence
did without question create the dynamics that saw a variety of potentially violent
factions emerge.
The late Suharto period sa w a consolidation of his use of the Islamist
agenda to justify his rule and keep other forces within the nation-state in check,
notably the military. The third chapter highlighted in detail the process by which
Suharto began to integrate the forces of conservative Islam into the corporatised
structure of his regime and the process by which he began to privilege individual
leaders within those movements. The fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 and the
prospects of democratisation that created occurred within the framework of an
Indonesian political culture that had been both corporatised and Islamised in the
late years of the New Order. This dynamic sa w a number of groups that were
privileged under Suharto begin to compete for resources and prestige in the ne w
political experiment resulting in increasing amounts of inter-communal and religious
violence.
The fourth chapter addressed in detail the process by which Islamism
became a voice of expression for a variety of groups looking to recalibrate their
positions in the post Suharto period. I demonstrated the extent to which the rise of
these movements while justified by and in defence of Islam, had more to do with
distinctly secular questions of access to state po wer and resources. The change
in political dynamic in post New Order Indonesia also sa w a “back to the future”
on the role of Islam and the changing parameters of Indonesian nationalism. The
same voices that in the 1950s were arguing for the Islamisation of the Indonesian
state were, in the post New Order period, arguing for a return to that agenda.
Despite the expansion of a variety of different types of Islamist organisations in
134
the late New Order period, including those funded by sources in the Persian Gulf
and the gro wing traction of “Camp Islam”, there w as an inability of Islam to
coalesce as a mass movement for political change. During the immediate post
New Order period in addition to the evolvement of conservative manifestations of
the Islamist agenda, a number of other types of Islamist movements emerged
concluding with those that would be more closely associated with Sufism and/or
New Age Spiritualism and thus, demonstrating once again that ascribing
processes of violent transformation in the radicalisation process on its o wn is
highly problematic.
Certainly, of the different types of Islamism that emerged during this time it
is clear that there was a particular attraction to the theologically austere and/or
radical manifestations of this agenda. The third chapter demonstrated the extent
to which nuance is necessary in analysing this phenomenon, as the attraction to
austere types of theology as stated before had more to do with a set of secular
processes and in particular the unequal unfolding of the globalisation process and
the inability of secular leaders to deliver an effective governance agenda.
Moreover, it is clear that just because increasingly large numbers of people were
attracted to austere manifestations of Islamism this did not equate to increased
levels of violent transformation problematising the connection bet ween equating
manifestations of piety and specific acts of violence. Just because someone
adopts Salafi discourse and attends anti-American rallies in the centre of Jakarta
does not mean they are being radicalised and/or more likely to commit acts of
violence. The fourth chapter demonstrated the extent to which it is necessary to
separate acts of processes of rhetorical radicalisation from the real thing. Just
because someone adopts the discourse of bin Laden doesn’t mean they will
emulate his actions.
The fifth chapter addressed the theme of radicalisation from both a
theoretical and practical perspective and analysed several leading theoretical
135
typologies of the radicalization process and then based on the limitations of those
processes, I suggested a ne w means by which to observe the radicalisation
phenomenon. I suggested that rather than looking at radicalisation through the lens
of either versions of fla wed theology or social grievances, that radicalisation
instead should be vie wed through the lens of five independent socializing drivers.
Continuing on the basis of the third and fourth chapter where I establish the role
of secular forces in the unfolding of violent religiosity I suggest that radicalisation
needs to be understood through a combination of social network, leadership,
ideology, time pressure and criminality. To test this theory I looked at two leading
Salafi-Jihadist organisations and while limited, this case study did demonstrate the
extent to which violent transformation has to be observed through a combination
of socialising processes.
As I stated at the beginning of these concluding remarks, the conclusions
of this study represent a beginning and not an end. More work needs to be done
and more research needs be engaged in to test the efficacy of the five drivers
approach which will be the basis of my PhD research. Ideally, this will include a
substantive field work component through which I can construct detailed and
individual case studies. This thesis has, in a limited capacity, demonstrated the
complex trajectories involved in processes of violent transformation amongst
Islamists in Indonesia and to the extent possible has attempted to engage a ne w
theoretical typology to help understand the evolution of this phenomenon.
Moreover, this thesis has, to the extent possible, delinked questions of theology
and social grievances as the primary drivers in processes of violent
transformation and instead raises the question of the role of the nation-state as
both an agent provocateur and subjugator of violent Islamist religiosity. Questions
over the role of Islam in the context of a democratising Indonesia are complex and
demand complex levels of analysis among academic and public policy leaders.
Responding to the unique challenge posed by groups who are willing to inflict
136
mass casualties justified for and in defence of Islam presents a unique and
difficult challenge. By returning to New Order style tactics of managing the forces
of religion for political ends as a means of responding to this challenge, is a
dangerous game which history has sho wn does not work. Ultimately, in Indonesia
like else where, violent Islamism whilst problematic and unlikely to disappear from
the socio-political landscape in the near future is getting less popular not more
popular. JI’s increasingly violent tactics in the early 2000s isolated it both from its
o wn far right wing faction and more importantly from mainstream Indonesian
Islam. Thus, while conservative austere and radical manifestations of Islam will
continue to be popular for some time the extent to which these ideologies
represent a gate way to violent manifestations of Islamist religiosity remains highly
questionable. Scholars working in the field need to be nuanced and engage
appropriate levels of analysis in addressing this complex phenomenon.
137
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